What if the murder you had to solve was your own?
Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She's also the victim of a local serial killer. Recently brought back to life and returned to her grieving family by a government project, she is grateful for this second chance. But as the new Lou re-adapts to her old routines, and as she bonds with other female victims, she realizes that disturbing questions remain about what exactly preceded her death and how much she can really trust those around her.
Now it's not enough to care for her child, love her husband, and work the job she's always enjoyed--she must also figure out the circumstances of her death. Darkly comic, tautly paced, and full of surprises, My Murder is a devour-in-one-sitting, clever twist on the classic thriller.
The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare.
Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their own desires. From the ironically romantic artist narrator, to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after.
An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s.
There’s Willard Russell, a tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer, no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.”
There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate.
There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law.
Caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
Museum of the Weird is a stunning collection of stories that reveal wondrous play and surreal humor.
A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection.
Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.
Detective Miles Jensen is called to the lawless town of Santa Mondega to investigate a spate of murders. This would all be quite ordinary in those rough streets, except that Jensen is the Chief Detective of Supernatural Investigations.
The breakneck plot centers around a mysterious blue stone—The Eye of the Moon—and the men and women who all want to get their hands on it: a mass murderer with a drinking problem, a hit man who thinks he's Elvis, and a pair of monks among them. Add in the local crime baron, an amnesiac woman who's just emerged from a five-year coma, a gypsy fortune teller, and a hapless hotel porter, and the plot thickens fast.
Most importantly, how do all these people come to be linked to the strange book with no name? This is the anonymous, ancient book that no one seems to have survived reading. Everyone who has ever read it has been murdered. What can this mean?
Slapstick presents an apocalyptic vision as seen through the eyes of the current King of Manhattan (and last President of the United States). It's a wickedly irreverent look at the all-too-possible results of today’s follies.
But even the end of life-as-we-know-it is transformed by Kurt Vonnegut’s pen into hilarious farce—a final slapstick that may be the Almighty’s joke on us all.
Mickey Sabbath is a comic creation of epic proportions, and at sixty-four, he is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. Sex is both an obsession and a principle, serving as an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence.
Following the death of his long-time mistress—a free-spirited woman with a taste for the impermissible that matches his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a series of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.
Sabbath's Theater is Philip Roth at the peak of his powers, delivering a narrative that is both hilarious and profoundly moving.
Kenzaburō Ōe, internationally acclaimed as one of the most important and influential post-World War II writers, is known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and his own struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son.
His most personal book, A Personal Matter, is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage. His utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child. Bird is left with a disconcerting picture of the human predicament as he navigates shame, disgrace, and self-discovery.
This novel is a profound exploration of personal crisis and the search for meaning in the chaos of life.
Stephen King cranks up the suspense in a different kind of bedtime story. A game of seduction between a husband and wife goes horribly awry when the husband dies. But the nightmare has just begun...
Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer home on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. After being handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games, but when Gerald refuses to stop, she lashes out at him with deadly consequences. Still handcuffed, she is trapped and alone. Painful memories from her childhood bedevil her. Her only company is a hungry stray dog and the sundry voices that populate her mind.
As night comes, she is unsure whether it is her imagination or if she has another companion: someone watching her from the corner of her dark bedroom.
If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P.G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel by the author of London Fields.
The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed.
But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of "dead babies" — dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.
Angels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up.
So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards, and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral through rape, alcohol, drugs, and crime, to madness and death.
From the author of Tree of Smoke, this novel offers a vivid portrayal of America's dispossessed, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.