Suspenseful, strange and riveting -- Wolves in disguise, birds as terrifying harbingers, prisoners-of-war and murderers inhabit the pages of this mini-collection from Douglas Clegg, award-winning and bestselling writer of The Children's Hour and Neverland. Three short stories and one novelette, originally published in a special deluxe limited hardcover.

"Clegg (The Machinery of Night) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories....riveting reading." -- Publishers Weekly

Suspense and Horror Tales

In "The Wolf" a hunter guides a young man up a mountain to track down the creature that has been slaughtering sheep 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.

In the novellette, "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.

Books by Douglas Clegg

The Hour Before Dark

The Children’s Hour

Goat Dance

Purity

Dark of the Eye

The Words

Wild Things

Nightmare House

Bad Karma

Red Angel

Night Cage

Mischief

The Infinite

The Abandoned

The Necromancer

Isis

You Come When I Call You

Naomi

The Nightmare Chronicles

The Machinery of Night

Breeder

The Attraction

Praise for Douglas Clegg's Fiction

"Douglas Clegg knows exactly what scares us, and he knows just how to twist those fears into hair-raising chills..." - Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series.

"Clegg delivers!"

— John Saul, bestselling author of Faces of Fear and The Devil's Labyrinth.

"Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction."

— Peter Straub

author of Ghost Story and the NY Times Bestseller Black House (with Stephen King)

"Clegg is one of the best!"

— Richard Laymon

"Douglas Clegg is a weaver of nightmares!"

— Robert R. McCammon