Discover the haunting stories of Crawford Award-winning author Christopher Barzak in his new collection Before and Afterlives. These are tales of relationships with unearthly domesticity and eeriness: a woman falls in love with a haunted house; a beached mermaid is substituted for a disappeared daughter; the imaginary friend of a murdered young woman stalks the streets of her small town; a mother’s teenage son is afflicted with a disease that causes him to vanish; a father exploits his daughter’s talent for calling ghosts to her; and a wife leaves her husband and children to fulfill her obligations in the world from which she escaped.
“[Barzak] treads a delicate line between the paranormal ghost romance and the more nuanced literary tradition that includes Shirley Jackson, Peter S. Beagle, and Robert Nathan…Before and Afterlives is a fine introduction to the short fiction of an author who, in a fairly short career, has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices and lyrically effective prose stylists in recent fantasy.” –Gary K. Wolfe for Locus Magazine
“Masterfully crafted…each one packs a punch.” –Publishers Weekly
“Throughout this collection, Barzak effectively writes people contending with their fears and doubts but most especially he writes about loneliness. Barzak makes it all seem so easy, these gentle glimpses into his characters’ lives, and even though these lives might include mermaids or ghostly parents or talking fireflies,the extraordinary aspects are not what make his tales so magical. It’s the way he sees plain ordinary people that gives his stories such power. Bravo.” –Bookslut