Wild Things: Four Tales

by Douglas Clegg

Overview

The Most Terrifying Beast Wears a Human Face... "Clegg (The Machinery of Night) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories...riveting reading." -- Publishers Weekly.

From award-winning author Douglas Clegg comes a special quartet of stories dealing with creatures of the wild--wolf, bird, and the most terrifying of beasts, the human variety.

Contents

• In "The Wolf" a hunter guides a younger man up a mountain to track down the creature 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.
• , In the novella, "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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944668303
Publisher:	Alkemara Press
Publication date:	02/18/2020
Series:	Douglas Clegg Short Story Collections
Pages:	146
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling author of dark fiction, including horror, gothic, fantasy, supernatural, and suspense thrillers. Clegg’s first novel, Goat Dance, launched his career as a novelist. He has seen more than 30 books published within a span of 25 years, as well as more than 40 short stories. His short fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the Shocker Award, and it has also been included in several Years’ Best anthologies.

Date of Birth:

April 1, 1958

Place of Birth:

Alexandria, Virginia

Editorial 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. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly