The time between the waning of the Hunter's Moon and All Hallows' Eve is what the old-timers call Deep Autumn, when the clocks will be turned back and the curtains drawn against unwanted eyes. It is a period of reminiscences and backward glances. It is the season of sleepless nights when accumulated sins flicker in the mind's eye like leave dancing in the bitter wind. Presented here are fifteen stories of the fall-and the lies and regrets that accompany the plummet. In Deep Autumn, a young girl suffers brain damage after falling from a tree and is venerated as a saint with healing abilities by her neighbors; a Ouija board session draws blood, while a survivor of childhood trauma tries not to float; the block where sixty-four souls were consumed in eight houses becomes consecrated ground; a couple are trapped in a motel room by the ghosts of what might have been and what will never be; a writer recovering from addiction is seduced by the legend of the Lord's Finger; and a young girl finds the seeds of escape in the drawings dropped from a second story window by a boy forever locked away. These tales and more explore the melancholia and occasional madness that comes when the mornings are as dark as the nights and the crunch of dead leaves underfoot serve as a reminder of the reckoning of the season. This is the time of the dares. This is a time to let go. This is Deep Autumn.

If terrorism begins at home, then school bullies are the first wave... Thirteen year-old Magdalene Barrows is still reeling from her brother Michael's disappearance the previous summer. Now another child has vanished. There's been a shooting in a second grade classroom. Eight-year-old Katie has a ring of bruises around her arm. And Magdalene believes the bullies are to blame. It is nine months after 9/11, and Mondauk County is on edge and seething with secrets. Magdalene's father, the recently sober assistant DA, has been assigned the prosecution of the second grade shooter and (bowing to political pressure) the boy's mother. Magdalene, who ended the school year with her second suicide attempt, uncovers connections between the school bullies, Katie's father, and the widow of a firefighter slain on 9/11 that may link the school shooting to the disappearances. But to confront bully chieftain Stevie Rich, she will have to enter the lawless recesses of Paradise Lakes Trailer Park. Magdalene must race against impending indictments, as well as reoccurring dreams that threaten to reveal her role in her brother's fate, in order to rescue Katie and solve a murder before the bullies make her the next citizen of Mondauk County to disappear.

Sweater Girl and Other Tales of Mondauk County is a collection of novellas and stories that explores the condition of morbid nostalgia: being so bound to the past that it poisons the present and chokes the future. In the novella "Sweater Girl," a man combs through the ashes of a teenage party that took place forty years ago, looking for clues to what had transpired, including arson, an amputation, and the death of his father, while obsessing on the party's catalyst, an enthralling young sweater girl. Plus...a retired romance novelist faces her fears of intimacy in a most radical fashion...a cult member becomes consumed with an underage girl...a loner signs up for a spelling bee to impress a popular girl on the eve of an assault on the school...as a weary detective hunts the Red Ribbon Killer, a grandmother confronts the secret in her shed...an ex-boxer squares off against a mob capo when his wife disappears...a man finds a radio broadcasting from his past in the abandoned Divine Lorraine Hotel...and after his hand gets stuck to a girl's hair with paste, a giant of a boy is hunted by a vengeful mob.

Enter a world without angels, a world explored in three novellas, on each for Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell. From the author of Saving Magdalene and Deep Autumn. In I See No Angels: A priest becomes convinced that murdering an elderly parishioner is a necessary sacrifice and his last chance at redemption. A man suffering from a sleep disorder finds himself surrounded by dead people-one or all of whom he may have killed. A father teaches his family to disregard all boundaries, then stands witness to his wife and children exploding every taboo in order to destroy all they've ever known-except their objects of affection. If there are no angels, are there rules? Or are we left with lives filled with bullying, neglect, mayhem, incest, and murder? If there are no angels, who will take their place?