Bad Intentions

Norman Partridge's first story collection, Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, won a Bram Stoker Award, and his first novel, Slippin' Into Darkness, garnered the highest praise from horror critics; so it's no surprise that this second collection is a knockout. Here, in dusty Southwestern settings with tawdry glimmers of pop culture, you'll find carnival roustabouts, an Elvis impersonator, a demon gunslinger, a gorilla gunslinger, monstrous automobiles, a heavyweight champ who's past his prime--all of them flirting with death, if not damnation, too. The fragmented narratives are at times a little befuddling, but the writing is lean and evocative, like Dennis Etchison or Jim Thompson. As Joe R. Lansdale writes in the introduction, "Bad Intentions will be one of the most important short story collections of the nineties." And this first edition of only 526 copies, with a striking cover painting by Ryan Dreimiller, will most likely be a collector's item.