American Morons
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
rom the the Shirley Jackson and International Horror Guild Award winning author of THE SNOWMAN'S CHILDREN, THE TWO SAMS, THE JANUS TREE, and the Motherless Child Trilogy comes AMERICAN MORONS, a collection of dazzling and haunting tales...
Two traveling college students confront their disintegrating relationship and the new American reality in a breakdown lane along the Italian Superstrade. A woman chases the ghost of her neglectful father to a vanished amusement park at the end of the Long Beach pier. Two recently retired teachers learn just how much Los Angeles has taken from them.
In these atmospheric, wide-ranging, surprisingly playful, and deeply mournful stories, grandkids and widows, ice cream-truck drivers and judges, travelers and invalids all discover — and sometimes even survive — the everyday losses from which the most vengeful ghosts so often spring.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ordinary bits of Americana show a dark and eerie aspect in the seven stories in Hirshberg's second collection (after 2003's The Two Sams). "Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air" is set in the arcades of a dying seaside boardwalk where characters see their unfocused lives mirrored in the decaying rides and unwinnable games of chance. "Safety Clowns" uses the mundane routines of a neighborhood ice cream truck as a springboard for an incongruous tale of supernatural vigilantism. The title story recalls the oblique horrors of Robert Aickman's weird tales in its account of two American travelers abroad who find themselves caught up in the indecipherable but increasingly menacing rituals of another culture. Hirshberg grounds his dark fantasies in minute details of the everyday that give them a discomfitingly believable foothold in reality. His skill at drawing horrors out of commonplace situations peopled with credibly drawn characters distinguishes these subtle tales of the uncanny as some of the most effective and chilling in contemporary weird fiction.
