From Amazon.com
"I want you frowning now, knowing something is very wrong with your parachute even before actually pulling the cord and praying it opens. P.S. It won't." So Jonathan Carroll addresses his readers in this much-awaited collection of 20 stories. Author of several wry and dark novels, Carroll has a considerable following, but his books are difficult to pigeonhole, so some horror and fantasy readers are still unfamiliar with him. This collection shows off his talents admirably, in tales that range from bittersweet sadness over God's failing memory, to a disturbing friendship between a dog and a dying child, to a macabre fantasy about how men and women manipulate each other. As
The New York Times put it, "Carroll's world is one that is subtly out of kilter, and which can take a turn for the sinister at any time." This volume is winner of the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Best Short Story Collection.
From Publishers Weekly
Carroll (From the Teeth of Angels) has a high reputation in literary SF and fantasy circles. This collection of 20 pieces of his short fiction suggests that it is well deserved. He has a conspicuous knack for giving new dimensions to venerable themes. "Friend's Best Man," which won a World Fantasy Award in 1987, offers a new take on the revolt of the animals. "Uh-Oh City" does marvelous things with the Jewish folkloric concept of the 36 Just Men on whom the world depends. "Black Cocktail" explores, in sometimes grisly detail, not merely the group mind but the group soul. The title story is a chilling exploration of a handicapped child's use of alter egos to explore, among other things, adult sexuality. The narrator of "The Sadness of Detail" sits down in her favorite cafe, only to be interrupted by a stranger who shows her photographs of her husband and son in the future and tells her how she can alter their destinies?and her own. Carroll's stories are tightly focused, with hardly an ill-chosen or misplaced word. They are distinguished by a powerfully haunting quality that derives from a deceptively simple combination of fantastic events related in the easy voice of a raconteur telling simple anecdotes.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
