LEAN CLOSER. Let these stories whisper poison into your ears.

 

This debut full length collection from Norman Prentiss opens with the Bram Stoker Award-winning title story, where an overheard conversation in a movie theater has unexpected effects on a couple's relationship.

 

In other unsettling tales: suffer the consequences of an ill-timed Halloween prank; encounter strange creatures in the woods or in an airport waiting room; visit an abandoned amusement park or a secluded town of oddly shaped inhabitants; confront a sinister murderer who seems to be everywhere at once, or meet a man who simply can't be bothered to die.

 

The collection concludes with "Four Legs in the Morning," the first appearance of Dr. Sibley, a mysterious college professor who enacts revenge on those who defy or disappoint him; and the full-text of the Stoker-winning novella, "Invisible Fences."

 

NORMAN PRENTISS is the author of Odd Adventures With Your Other Father and Life In a Haunted House, and he won the 2010 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for Invisible Fences, also published by Cemetery Dance Publications. He also won a 2009 Stoker for his short story, "In the Porches of My Ears," published in Postscripts 18. Other publications include The Book of Baby Names, The Fleshless Man, Four Legs in the Morning, The Halloween Children (written with Brian James Freeman), and The Narrator (written with Michael McBride). His website is: normanprentiss.com

 

"Prentiss’s understated style works excellently for the subject matter—there’s a creeping menace under many of his stories that worms its way beneath the reader’s skin before it can even be noticed. Weird fiction readers will find a lot to love here." - Publisher's Weekly

 

"The monsters at the heart of Norman Prentiss's disquieting, deceptively hushed fiction are overheard conversations, misunderstood gestures, the things both partners in a relationship have agreed never to say. At least until those things sprout teeth, fur, the ability to curse, and turn into even more terrifying monsters." - Glen Hirshberg, author of Infinity Dreams and the Motherless Children trilogy.

 

"I've never forgotten a Norman Prentiss story. He builds his nightmares gently, word by word, sentence by sentence, working his way into your subconscious so that you are never sure again if it happened to you, or you dreamt it, or it was a Prentiss story." - Kaaron Warren, Award-Winning author of Through Splintered Walls, The Grinding House, and Dead Sea Fruit.