Wild Things: Four Tales

Wild Things: Four Tales
by Douglas Clegg

About the Book:
From award-winning and bestselling author Douglas Clegg comes a special quartet of stories dealing with creatures of the wild—some are wolf, some bird, some the most terrifying of beasts: the human variety. Two of these tales—"The Wolf" and "The American"—are previously unpublished.

"The Wolf" is the dark story of a wolf hunter who guides a younger man up a mountain to kill a wolf that has been slaughtering in the valley below.

"The American" takes place at a late-night cafe in Rome where foreigners gather. On this particular night a stranger steps out of the shadowy park to sit at the sidewalk tables and speak of love and murder.

In "A Madness of Starlings," a father, teaching his children about protection from the predators of life, takes in a fledgling bird. But when it's time for the bird to fly away, the forces of nature come undone and a secret wisdom and terror enter the mind of the one who understands the language of birds.

Finally, in "The Dark Game," a war hero and his men are captured and taken into a prison camp. There, tortures and torments await them, but the man named Gordon Raglan begins to use a childhood game of escape to help him discover a way to hunt the wolves surrounding him.

Wild Things: Four Tales is a unique and exclusive Cemetery Dance book, with no other editions planned anywhere in the world at this time!

"Clegg (The Machinery of Night) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories. "A Madness of Starlings" concerns a man who looks to nature for reassurance of his fatherly instincts only to find his dislocating feelings of angst and alienation mirrored instead. In "The Dark Game," an American soldier turns tables on his captors in Vietnam with the help of an especially brutal survival trick involving self-hypnosis. "The American" is a spare, Hemingwayesque tale of threatened manhood with an Alfred Hitchcock twist. "The Wolf" tells of a hunting expedition in which the roles of predator and prey are craftily reversed. Though several stories stretch the theme of this volume, each makes riveting reading."
— Publishers Weekly

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:
• Hardcover Limited Edition of 1,500 signed copies ($20)
• Traycased Hardcover Lettered Edition of 52 signed and lettered copies ($125)

Excerpt

Artwork