- A young girl, lying in
the way-back of a station wagon during an all-night family road trip,
becomes convinced that the people up front are no longer her parents.
- A dutiful Jewish nephew slowly comes to understand — and
fear — his aging aunts’ obsession with the exotic animals wandering loose
on a nearby farm in suburban Baltimore.
- A Japanese immigrant, isolated in a California mountain town
while caring for her dying husband, begins seeing Tall Things in the
corners of her house. Whisperers. They tell her they are coming to live
in her mouth.
- And in the Shirley Jackson Award-winning title novelette, a
decaying mining town in Montana provides the backdrop for a desperate
battle between a troubled, pugnacious pre-teen, the bully who has
terrorized him, and the much more sinister force neither child realizes
has come for them.
Welcome back to Glen Hirshberg country, where griefs are at least as
dangerous as ghosts. Where terror and wonder become not just
inextricable but often indistinguishable. Where the worlds of
imagination and everyday reality color and corrode and sometimes
overwhelm each other.
A country surprisingly like your own.
Contents:
- The Janus Tree
- I Am Coming to Live in Your Mouth
- You Become the Neighborhood
- The Pikesville Buffalo
- Shomer
- Miss Ill-Kept Runt
- Millwell
- Like Lick Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey
- The Nimble Men
- Esmerelda
- After-Words
