Gateways to Abomination is on sale for only $2.99 in the eBook version until I wake up tomorrow! What a deal! The paperback is still discounted to $7.19. Tell your friends!

http://amzn.com/1500346721

Douglas Archibald Harbor was twelve years old when he discovered that he could bend others’ wills to his own. Within three weeks of the discovery, he was dangerously obese and had acquired a social disease which, fortunately, was treatable. And so Douglas Archibald Harbor was twelve years old when he discovered restraint, when he discovered caution ( Read more... )

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When the call comes, it's never at a convenient time. In this instance, it was at 4 p.m. on a rainswept Saturday in late November. My great uncle, having lived to the improbable age of 102, had apparently finally worn down the staff at Brookside Willow Pavilions with his increasingly loud and incoherent and doleful jeremiads, and the Board of ( Read more... )

The boy stood at the edge of the playground, his thumb worrying the corner of his mouth, the fingers of his other hand squeezed into the diamond-shaped hole of the chain link fence, his red hair tousled by the wind. Like that he stood for some time and then quite suddenly and for no discernible reason turned and ran, kicking up dirt clouds, like ( Read more... )

God save us from girls who are into hiking, I used to say, until I met Janet. I resisted for a long time; I let her hike while I lounged on the couch; I gave her my old line about being an avid indoorsman...and she laughed it off, grabbed my hand, and dragged me in to the Massachusetts woods kicking, as they say, and screaming.

And who knew, but ( Read more... )

We used to sit with Uncle Jeb, Earl and I, and listen to him talk.

If you’d never seen a picture of a human skull, you could just gape at Jeb’s visage--the skin was as though painted on, and a poor job done of it to boot. His frame was so narrow and slight that clothes seemed to weigh it down. Though he’d shiver like the dickens in winter, he ( Read more... )

I remember very clearly when my mother told me I was not adopted. The year was 1985. I was fifteen. I was standing in our yellow-green kitchen near the yellow refrigerator, staring at a painting of peaches and pears cradled in a wooden green bowl. "I am your mother," she said, plucking absently at her heroic perm. "Biological, and for real. ( Read more... )

It always happened at the craggy precipice of sleep, so I never knew if it was a dream or a memory. I was swimming in brown water, terrified I might be swimming down...away from the surface. But then I would emerge, bellowing out breath, the water crumbling to dust around me, a flat steel sky with black-painted clouds above. I would crawl, then ( Read more... )

I entered into a cramped area with a carpet piled with shoes of all varieties: oil-stained sneakers; bent high heels; flattened boat shoes; bedroom slippers; boots, some impossibly tall; slingbacks, clogs, and mules; sandals, birkenstocks, and flip-flops. To the pile I added my ancient bluchers. I opened a white, graffiti littered door and ( Read more... )