Picking the Bones

Picking the Bones
by Brian Hodge

About the Book:
Dying is easy. Living is hard.

Step back, back into the world of 1996…

"Dark fiction so numbing cold and cutting edge you better hold onto your ass with your free hand … There are no simple ‘entertainments' or cheap grabs for the throat to be found here. Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day."

So wrote critic Stanley Wiater about Brian Hodge's renowned first short fiction collection, The Convulsion Factory. Three collections later, nothing has changed.

Well … maybe one or two trifling entertainments. A couple of cheap grabs for some body part or another. But that's about it. There are still plenty of fates worse than death.

Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels featuring many diverse flavors of horror and crime. A repeat offender in various year's-best anthologies — including for 2010 — he's also written close to 100 short stories and novellas, many of which have been sutured together into three earlier collections. His works have been translated into several languages, including French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Japanese.

He lives with his soulmate snug against the mountains of Colorado, where he sighs and shakes his head at an ever-expanding list of must-do's, including photography, music and soundscaping, slinging iron, and Krav Maga training.

He is currently engaged in a protracted locked-cage death match with novel #11. Only one of them will emerge victorious.

Cyber-stalk him at www.brianhodge.net, http://warriorpoetblog.com, and http://www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter

Praise for Brian Hodge's previous collection, Lies & Ugliness
"Hodge, one of the most articulate members of the younger generation of dark fantasists, applies his considerable talents to finding original embodiments of fears and anxieties that define his soul searching characters … Readers will have to look far to find a more thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of dark fantasies."
— Publishers Weekly

"Good writers of both psychological horror and the grotesque fantastic only pretend to be peddling blood-splattered sleaze. They're moralists at heart — and Hodge is a particularly inventive one … A bravura performance by a true virtuoso."
— Locus

"Hodge never takes me where I expect to go. Hodge took me to places I'd never even dreamed of. And then twisted some of those … His stories are more than just tales, but intricate and thorough investigations of a life, a problem, or a world."
— Blood Rose

"There may be those who write with as much authenticity, but no one has more ability to find the truth in as many forms or write it so well as a story. Hodge has the capacity to put his palm over the flame and carefully observe his flesh char — then write about the experience with unflinching, exquisite prose."
— Cemetery Dance

Table of Contents:
With Acknowledgments To Sun Tzu
If I Should Wake Before I Die
The Passion of the Beast
De Fortuna
The Firebrand Symphony
Brushed In Blackest Silence
Pull
An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Flesh
And They Will Come In The Hour of Our Greatest Need
Re: Your Application of 5/5
Where the Black Stars Fall
When the Silence Gets Too Loud
Guardian
Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin
A Good Dead Man Is Hard To Find
Our Turn Too Will One Day Come
When the Bough Doesn't Break

Published in two states:
• Hardcover Limited Edition of 750 copies signed by the author, bound in full-cloth and Smyth sewn ($40)
• Traycased Lettered Edition of 26 signed and lettered copies bound in leather with a satin ribbon page marker ($175)