STAINS IN YOUR MIND This volume's twenty horrific tales vary in style and extremity, but each aims to leave an unusual, dark, and lasting impression. It begins with "Silence," a surreal haunting about a woman who visits a strange house and then quietly loses the people closest to her. It ends with "Mandy Schneider Makes Friends," a taboo-breaking account of three psychopaths who form an alliance and then torture a group of campers and their chaperones. Arranged into five sections or "blots" that might stain your psyche in ...
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STAINS IN YOUR MIND This volume's twenty horrific tales vary in style and extremity, but each aims to leave an unusual, dark, and lasting impression. It begins with "Silence," a surreal haunting about a woman who visits a strange house and then quietly loses the people closest to her. It ends with "Mandy Schneider Makes Friends," a taboo-breaking account of three psychopaths who form an alliance and then torture a group of campers and their chaperones. Arranged into five sections or "blots" that might stain your psyche in different ways with the atrocities they depict, the stories explore distorted responses to tragedy, strange connections that form when people give in to chance, political anxieties acted out through rent flesh and spilt blood, miraculous feats paid for with massacres, and a crime that lives on in a place and in people devoted to human violation. In "David Langley and the Burglar," a thief works up the nerve to add more violence to his crimes, and his intended victim struggles to escape from what seems to be a supernatural trap. In "Highway Romance," a truck driver takes an illicit interest in a boy he sees in a passing car, and the boy lures him on, pursuing illicit and deadly interests of his own. "Dinner for Two" follows media-obsessed Brandon Landry as he becomes a mass shooter and meets his fan Daisy Ruttle, who after watching him online has decided she must play a part in his murders. A small, diverse group tries to dispatch the scourge of their neighborhood-a white supremacist who refuses to die, no matter how grisly the attempt to kill him-in "Undying Support." "Blood and Feathers" presents a fateful early meeting between Dr. Allen V. Fincher and Elijah Eagleton, characters familiar from some of Cooper's other works, a meeting that spawns a spate of human sacrifices. In "Eternal Recurrence of Suburban Abortion," a young woman goes to a house famous for the atrocities committed there to have something removed from her body, and she ends up on a mind-bending journey between lives. Seven of these stories have not previously been published, and the others are otherwise unavailable. They share fascinations with the macabre and the grotesque, as well as with storytelling that defies the typical. While some possess a twisted sense of humor, all seek to disturb. Get comfortable. It won't last.
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