The Machinery of Night

The Machinery of Night
by Douglas Clegg

About the Book:
A massive short story collection from this best-selling author, collecting virtually ALL of Douglas Clegg's chilling short stories and novellas, as well as featuring brand new, never-before-published fiction! This collection features nearly forty works of fiction, is almost 250,000 words in length, and has nine never-before-seen works and one never before in-print novelette, along with two complete novellas. The Machinery of Night is a landmark collection and sure to be one of the best books of 2005!

" When a character in Clegg's "I Am Infinite: I Contain Multitudes" observes, "Love transformed into fear. It's the human story," he could be describing just about any one of the 39 eerie and provocative tales gathered in this career retrospective. Their horrors are all the more unsettling because they grow out of love, friendship, family ties and other emotional bonds, which, in Clegg's hands, show a natural tendency to turn malignant and pathological. In "People Who Love Life," a man's inability to give up loving a woman raises her from the dead against her will. "Underworld" tells of a haunting that culminates in a dead wife giving birth to a child as the final expression of love for her husband. In "The Words," high school misfits form a bond of friendship that leads ineluctably to their tampering with occult forces and unleashing horrors into the world. Even in a story such as "Ice Palace," about a fraternity prank gone horribly wrong, an expression of affection turns perverse and leads the narrator into an otherworldly realm whose strangeness seems to perfectly capture his own emotional ambivalence. Clegg (Afterlife) doesn't entirely avoid the classic figures of horror, such as the vampire in "White Chapel" and the Lovecraftian obsessive in "Purity," but he works startlingly original variations on them. Filled with penetrating character studies and haunting insights into the dark side of the human condition, these highly original stories are some of the best short horror fiction written since the 1980s."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Table of Contents:
Foreword
Halloween Memory
Where Flies are Born
People Who Love Life
Damned If You Do
The Party
Becoming Men
Something Terrible is Always Happening
The Cabinet-Maker's Wife
Fries With That?
The Machinery of Night
265 and Heaven
Mrs. Freely
Ice Palace
The Five
Freshmen Survey English Lit Beowulf to Jonathan Swift
White Chapel
Subway Turnstile
I Am Infinite; I Contain Multitudes
The Joss House
Martha
Underworld
Medea
The Hurting Season
The Fruit of Her Womb
The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon
The Mysteries of Paris
The Skin of the World
Why My Doll is Evil
Piercing Men
Only Connect
The Little Mermaid
The Night Before Alec Got Married
O, Rare and Most Exquisite
The Virgin of the Rocks
The Rendering Man
Chosen
The Dark Game
The Words
Purity

Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling author of The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, Nightmare House, and The Hour Before Dark, among other novels. His recent short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award; and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

Clegg was born in Virginia and raised in Hawaii, Connecticut and Virginia. He has been writing fiction since childhood, but only pursued publication of it beginning in his late twenties. He has primarily written supernatural fiction -- from horror to fantasy to psychological suspense with a paranormal edge. His fiction-writing career currently spans about 20 years of constant writing and publication. Additionally, he's been Director of Marketing for a publisher, editor for a bookstore's website, a marketing consultant for publishers, publicity firms, and booksellers -- and a wrangler for the cats, dogs and rabbits that have occupied his home. He has also co-authored the book Buzz Your Book with M.J. Rose. The two have also written a screenplay together. So far, these are Clegg's only collaborations.

In 1999, Douglas Clegg launched the internet's (and world's) first publisher-sponsored e-serial novel. Called Naomi, Clegg later went on to sell both hardcover and paperback rights. In 2000, his short novel Purity became one of the most-downloaded fiction ebooks on the internet -- reaching more than 100,000 readers in its first year on the internet. In 2001, Purity became the world's-first fiction to appear on a cell phone -- and was nicknamed an M-Book at the time (for Mobile).

Clegg lives with his partner, Raul, in New England, with a small menagerie of rescued animals.

Published in two states:
• Limited Edition of 1,500 signed copies ($40)
• Traycased Lettered Edition of 52 signed and lettered copies bound in leather with a satin ribbon page marker ($150)

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