About the Author:
Douglas Clegg is the award-winning and bestselling author of horror, fantasy, and suspense fiction, including The Priest of Blood, The Lady of Serpents, Afterlife, The Hour Before Dark, and Mordred, Bastard Son among many others. He also pioneered the e-book and e-serial on the internet, and launched the internet's first publisher-sponsored serial novel in early 1999. Additionally, his novella, Purity, became the world's first m-book—an ebook for mobile devices in the year 2000. His fiction has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Shocker Award. He was born in Virginia, but currently lives with his spouse, Raul, on the coast of New England with three wild things: a cat, a dog, and a rabbit.

Wild Things: Four Tales
by Douglas Clegg

From award-winning and bestselling author Douglas Clegg comes a special quartet of stories dealing with creatures of the wild—some are wolf, some bird, some the most terrifying of beasts: the human variety. Two of these tales—"The Wolf" and "The American"—are previously unpublished.

"The Wolf" is the dark story of a wolf hunter who guides a younger man up a mountain to kill a wolf 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.

Finally, in "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.

"Clegg (The Machinery of Night) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories. "A Madness of Starlings" concerns a man who looks to nature for reassurance of his fatherly instincts only to find his dislocating feelings of angst and alienation mirrored instead. In "The Dark Game," an American soldier turns tables on his captors in Vietnam with the help of an especially brutal survival trick involving self-hypnosis. "The American" is a spare, Hemingwayesque tale of threatened manhood with an Alfred Hitchcock twist. "The Wolf" tells of a hunting expedition in which the roles of predator and prey are craftily reversed. Though several stories stretch the theme of this volume, each makes riveting reading."
 

Hardcover Limited Edition of 1,500 signed copies