Wild Things: Four Tales
by Douglas Clegg
From award-winning and bestselling author Douglas Clegg comes a special quartet
of stories dealing with creatures of the wild—some
are wolf, some bird, some the most terrifying of beasts: the human variety.
Two of these tales—"The Wolf" and "The
American"—are previously unpublished.
"The Wolf" is the dark story of a wolf hunter who guides a younger
man up a mountain to kill a wolf that has been slaughtering in the valley below.
"The American" takes place at a late-night cafe in Rome where foreigners
gather. On this particular night a stranger steps out of the shadowy park to
sit at the sidewalk tables and speak of love and murder.
In "A Madness of Starlings," a father, teaching his children about
protection from the predators of life, takes in a fledgling bird. But when it's
time for the bird to fly away, the forces of nature come undone and a secret
wisdom and terror enter the mind of the one who understands the language of
birds.
Finally, in "The Dark Game," a war hero and his men are captured
and taken into a prison camp. There, tortures and torments await them, but the
man named Gordon Raglan begins to use a childhood game of escape to help him
discover a way to hunt the wolves surrounding him.
Wild Things: Four Tales is a unique and exclusive Cemetery Dance book,
with no other editions planned anywhere in the world at this time!
Praise & Reviews:
"Clegg (The
Machinery of Night) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity
are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories. "A
Madness of Starlings" concerns a man who looks to nature for reassurance
of his fatherly instincts only to find his dislocating feelings of angst and
alienation mirrored instead. In "The Dark Game," an American soldier
turns tables on his captors in Vietnam with the help of an especially brutal
survival trick involving self-hypnosis. "The American" is a spare,
Hemingwayesque tale of threatened manhood with an Alfred Hitchcock twist. "The
Wolf" tells of a hunting expedition in which the roles of predator and
prey are craftily reversed. Though several stories stretch the theme of this
volume, each makes riveting reading."
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author:
Douglas Clegg is the award-winning and bestselling author of horror,
fantasy, and suspense fiction, including The Priest of Blood, The Lady of
Serpents, Afterlife, The Hour Before Dark, and Mordred, Bastard Son
among many others. He also pioneered the e-book and e-serial on the internet,
and launched the internet's first publisher-sponsored serial novel in early
1999. Additionally, his novella, Purity,
became the world's first m-book—an ebook for mobile
devices in the year 2000. His fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International
Horror Guild Award, and the Shocker Award. He was born in Virginia, but currently
lives with his spouse, Raul, on the coast of New England with three wild things:
a cat, a dog, and a rabbit.
Available in two states:
Hardcover Limited Edition of 1,500 signed copies ($20)
Traycased Hardcover Lettered Edition of 52 signed and lettered copies ($125)
Lettered Edition Status:
The deluxe Lettered Edition copies of this book have been bound, and our traycase
manufacturer has begun production on the traycases. We expect them later this
year. We will update this page when the Lettered Edition is ready to ship. Thank
you for your patience.
| Customer Reviews |
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    Where the Wild Things Are
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11/17/2006 - by Joshua Boone from Toluca Lake, CA US
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Douglas Clegg is one of the best writers out there. This short collection, containing four short stories, is a nice companion piece to The Machinery of Night. If you have these two books, I'm pretty sure you have all of Doug's short fiction. Two of the stories, The Wolf and The American, haven't been published before. A Madness of Starlings appeared in CD #50 and The Dark Game, though it stands alone, is a detour from his novel The Hour Before Dark. Highly recommended. My favorite story was The American, which I read twice in one sitting. And I love the smaller design of the book. Nice work, CD. And you can't beat the price.
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