Awry

From "one of the best-kept secrets in American indie literature" (Vol. 1 Brooklyn) comes a collection of stories exploring the limits of love, compassion, obsession, and duty. With stories of lonely accountants cloning themselves to disastrous results, lovers consuming their partners, children hearing voices telling them killing is compassionate, and women haunted by their deceased fetuses, Awry contains a strange and haunting world filled with painful decisions and human uncertainty. Whether the stories fun with a pack of coyotes on the plains or along the cobblestone streets of Prague, in a father's nightmare or in the lyrics of a mother's song to her unborn child, duncan b. barlow shows his master of the short story in the eleven tender and captivating stories collected here. "The remarkable tales collected in duncan b. barlow's Awry are the kinds of confidently written, powerfully distressing works of dark fiction that I ache to consume as an admirer of the eerie and the macabre. These stories about the misplaced and the lost are provoking, strange, and fiercely potent. It's inevitable that readers will finish this collection and find themselves bewildered and deeply affected." Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke "What makes these stories so strong is their sly combination of compassion and ruthlessness: you care about the well-drawn characters even as you know that very bad things are going to happen to them. Meticulous and precise, painful and surprising, Awry is a unique-and uniquely powerful-collection." Brian Evenson, author of Good Night, Sleep Tight and The Glass, Burning Floor of Hell