The Most Terrifying Beast Wears a Human Face..
. "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
. From award-winning author Douglas Clegg comes
a special quartet of stories
dealing with creatures of the wild--wolf, bird, and the most terrifying of beasts, the human variety.
Contents
In "The Wolf" a hunter guides a younger man up a mountain to track down the creature 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.
, In the novella, "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.