Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)

Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)

Greg Hrbek

Language: English

Pages: 192

ISBN: 0803236441

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Greg Hrbek’s Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories is a collection that explores what it means to be human—and inhuman. These ten stories have won an array of honors—and whether set in the historical past or in a speculative future, each is wildly imaginative and shockingly real.

In “Sagittarius,” selected for The Best American Short Stories, a mother and father search a dark forest for their missing newborn, who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous creature. In “False Positive,” a ghostly girl visits her biological father ten years after being aborted in utero. In “Bereavement,” a marriage is falling apart following a child’s accidental death, but a combination of myth and technology provides hope for a second life. Fantastic, horrific, painfully familiar, these stories are the work of a consummate storyteller.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

curtains. It comes from the floodlight on a neighbor’s back porch. He can make out his wife’s features. Can see that she has been awake, too. Didn’t like me much, Nora says. Huh? That girl. It was weird, the way she kept gravitating to you. But you know the weirdest thing. What? She sort of looked like you. He lies there, still. It all happened so long ago, but it’s coming back to him now. The airport, the gate. Your loved ones, anyone, could come up to the gate in those days, and the

Mr. Corrigan exited the room, leaving me just inside the door. The warden flipped a page. The hail tapped percussively against the building. A few cold stones lodged in my hair silently melted. He flipped another page and, as he digested its content, reached out to a small collection of picture frames that stood clustered at one corner of his desk. Very slowly, he rotated one of them, turning the image to face me. Francesca’s seventh-grade photograph. I had, suddenly, an uncontrollable urge to

To be discovered. Not to do this thing and get away with it and keep it secret forever. But to do it and have it come out and let the shock wave hit his marriage. Sometimes when they fight—and it is always the same fight, the same dumb peevishness, the predictable resentments of people being pushed to their limits—he imagines ushering her into the study and showing her his member profile page and the inbox full of saved electronic love letters and the two photos (not the third one) of the girl

butterflies already aflutter. group has a strange effect on you. it calms you like a drug. then wears off like a drug. seems like the same things happen to all of us, and our minds and bodies all have the same reactions. most people think that’s comforting. me? it just makes me more afraid. yours, franny p.s. sorry about yesterday’s entry. i know you know i didnt mean it. i’m not myself these days. December 12 at 1:37 a.m. symbols letters images! all meaningless! see this? (!) it’s an

the phone, over drinks in the city. His friends respond as animals respond to a territorial incursion. It’s not him they want to keep away, just his tragedy, which might be communicable somehow. Fine, he thinks. He doesn’t need any of them. He can get over this, he can mend what’s broken by himself. Without telling Carolyn, he goes ahead and orders the kit. Normally, you take a saliva sample from the inside of the cheek, send the swab back to the lab by mail, and receive, four to six weeks

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