Let Not Your Sorrow Die

Featuring sixteen pieces of short fiction—including three previously unpublished stories—Let Not Your Sorrow Die shows us what the darkest places reveal about what it means to be truly human. In the Shirley Jackson Award finalist for best short fiction, a desperate girl and her father search for change in the cold night and instead discover even darker tragedy in the “Back Seat.” A priest struggles to keep faith in his parishioners’ goodness, but when a child confesses a terrible secret to him, he is overwhelmed by “A Short Madness.” One antique collector’s grim acquisition is an elderly woman’s gateway to a last encounter with lost love at the end of a lonely life burdened by “The Loneliness of Not Being Haunted.” In “Memories of Me You,” an amnesiac sifts through recollections pieced together by a man’s desire to craft the perfect woman, finding instead her true identity in deconstruction. An enforcer for an outlaw biker gang must fight to survive the wild force unleashed by a desperate man’s final act in “Pigs Don’t Squeal in Tigertown.” From grisly atrocity tourism and the looming threat of the surveillance state to the inevitability of a hiker’s idyllic ending and the uncertainty of a final girl’s future, acclaimed author Bracken MacLeod brings to haunting life the fears of “random” violence, isolation, unwelcome connection, beginnings, endings, and all the terrors in between.