The Cleft and Other Odd Tales

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The Cleft and Other Odd Tales

Author: Gahan Wilson
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Publisher: Tor Books
Sometimes amusing, sometimes frightening, Wilson’s short fiction is as eclectic as his cartooning. “blot” is a classic horror tale with a particularly artistic twist. “Campfire Story” mixes nostalgia with unease. “The Marble Boy” is a story from the oral tradition—a tale that might be told around a campfire or during a sleepover.

These tales and the twenty-one others that fill out this collection are entertaining and unnerving. The Cleft and Other Odd Tales contains more than two dozen original Gahan Wilson illustrations.

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Amazon.com

World Fantasy Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winner Gahan Wilson is best known as a cartoonist, his work gathered in numerous collections drawn from Playboy, The New Yorker, and The National Lampoon, but he is also a writer. His fiction is the equal of his cartoons—delightfully macabre, witty, and warped—but apparently has never been collected until The Cleft and Other Odd Tales, which contains 24 short stories and short-shorts that range across a startling breadth of genres: horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, supernatural-detective, and even Oriental pulp adventure. Each tale is narrated in a unique, engaging voice and accompanied by a deliciously grim original illustration.

In “Sea Gulls,” an unhappy husband bent on murder finds his plans for his wife foiled in peculiar and chilling ways. In “The Casino Mirago,” a desperate international fugitive finds himself in the most clandestine of gaming establishments, gambling for very strange stakes. In “Them Bleaks,” a horror writer finds he has moved his family to a small town frightfully unsuited to his expectations. —Cynthia Ward

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