Description:
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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