The Hair Wreath and Other Stories

Girls and boys disappear; couples caught in the heat and suppressed rage of urban life are haunted by the ghosts of their own making; neighbourhoods drift in the murky atmosphere of buried emotions, where the echoes of distrust and dissonance prove that something just isn't...right. These strange stories gather and weave themselves together into a wreath of memories, rife with an atmospheric and ominous creep redolent of Shirley Jackson. This eerie collection illustrates the disconnect amongst people and the places they inhabit - the gap that allows the supernatural to flourish.

"Villegas's debut collection offers 19 tales that nicely blend ordinary characters with sudden and unexplained supernatural threats, but it eventually suffers from having too many similar stories so close together. 'His Ghost,' disturbing on multiple levels, tells the tale of an obsessive man in search of his muse. 'Salvage,' a haunting set on a spaceship, is efficiently creepy. 'An Unexpected Thing' is a solid, straightforward revenge story with a nasty undercurrent. Assorted pieces focusing on the fragility of relationships and urban and suburban alienation--'Meadowdene Estates,' 'Winter,' 'Neighbours,' and 'Peach Festival'--blur together, but 'D in the Underworld,' in which a woman searches for her missing daughter, rises above the rest. Fans of creepy, nongory horror will appreciate this collection despite its redundancies. (Oct.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)