The Janus Tree and Other Stories — Glen Hirshberg

* A young girl, lying in the way-back of a station wagon during an all-night family road trip, becomes convinced that the people up front are no longer her parents.

* A dutiful Jewish nephew slowly comes to understand--and fear--his aging aunts' obsession with the exotic animals wandering loose on a nearby farm in suburban Baltimore.

* A Japanese immigrant, isolated in a California mountain town while caring for her dying husband, begins seeing Tall Things in the corners of her house. Whisperers. They tell her they are coming to live in her mouth.

* And in the Shirley Jackson Award-winning title novelette, a decaying mining town in Montana provides the backdrop for a desperate battle between a troubled, pugnacious pre-teen, the bully who has terrorized him, and the much more sinister force neither child realizes has come for them.

Welcome back to Glen Hirshberg country, where griefs are at least as dangerous as ghosts. Where terror and wonder become not just inextricable but often indistinguishable. Where the worlds of imagination and everyday reality color and corrode and sometimes overwhelm each other.

A country surprisingly like your own.