Macabre desire. The grotesque unease of longing. Violence anticipated, violence realized.
Featuring sixteen pieces of short fiction-including three previously unpublished stories-Let Not Your Sorrow Die shows us what the darkest places reveal about what it means to be truly human.
In the Shirley Jackson Award finalist for best short fiction, a desperate girl and her father search for change in the cold night and instead discover even darker tragedy in the "Back Seat." A priest struggles to keep faith in his parishioners' goodness, but when a child confesses a terrible secret to him, he is overwhelmed by "A Short Madness."
One antique collector's grim acquisition is an elderly woman's gateway to a last encounter with lost love at the end of a lonely life burdened by "The Loneliness of Not Being Haunted."
In "Memories of Me You," an amnesiac sifts through recollections pieced together by a man's desire to craft the perfect woman, finding instead her true identity in deconstruction.
An enforcer for an outlaw biker gang must fight to survive the wild force unleashed by a desperate man's final act in "Pigs Don't Squeal in Tigertown."
From grisly atrocity tourism and the looming threat of the surveillance state to the inevitability of a hiker's idyllic ending and the uncertainty of a final girl's future, acclaimed author Bracken MacLeod brings to haunting life the fears of "random" violence, isolation, unwelcome connection, beginnings, endings, and all the terrors in between. "MacLeod's fiction is full of traps – some physical, some psychological, none easy to wriggle free of."~ Terrence Rafferty, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWBracken MacLeod is the Bram Stoker, Splatterpunk, and Shirley Jackson Award nominated author of the novels, is the author of the novels, MOUNTAIN HOME, STRANDED, COME TO DUST, and CLOSING COSTS (available in hardcover and paperback from William Morrow).His short fiction has been collected in WHITE KNIGHT AND OTHER PAWNS and 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS, which the New York Times Book Review called, "Superb." Before devoting himself to full time writing, he worked as a civil and criminal litigator, a university philosophy instructor, and a martial arts teacher. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and son, where he is at work on his next novel.
