The Panic Hand

Bram Stoker Award 1996, World Fantasy Best collection nominee 1996. Contents:

• Mr Fiddlehead
• Uh-Oh City
• The Fall Collection
• Friend's Best Man
• The Sadness of Detail
• Waiting to Wave
• The Jane Fonda Room
• A Quarter Past You
• My Zoondel
• Learning to Leave
• The Panic Hand
• The Bear in the Mouth
• Postgraduate
• Tired Angel
• Black Cocktail
• The Dead Love You
• Florian
• The Life of My Crime
• A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings
• A Flash in the Pants

A collection of unforgettable stories by the author of From the Teeth of Angels, the most original and sophisticated voice in contemporary horror. Jonathan Carroll's eight novels have gained him an enviable reputation as perhaps the most critically admired and respected writer in horror today. His work is a distinctive and instantly recognizable blend of fantasy, magical realism and horror, grounded in realistically and sympathetically portrayed characters and situations. In a recent front-page review in the Los Angeles Times, he was described as ”a movie-generation virtuoso with the literary sensibility of a metaphysical eccentric. You never know where you stand...once you're hooked, you have to read all of them.” And the Observer, reviewing his last novel, From the Teeth of Angels, declared that ”Carroll is like Death in his narrative skills—all benign plausibility and ratlike cunning.” Here, for the first time in English, are Carroll's collected stories, a wide-ranging showcase for his talents, and in particular for his extraordinary ability to turn a situation disturbingly and terrifyingly on its head in an instant. See for yourself in these prize-winning small doses if all the noise that has been made about this remarkably unsettling writer is justified.