The Fire Doll

Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2017. Trade paperback, New,. Nancy Parsons. Huntsville: Texas Review Press:, 2017. Trade paperback, New, 147 pp.<br/> Cover artwork by: Nancy Parsons An "as new" copy. "The stories in The Fire Doll investigate the notion that our experience can be richer, more inclusive, and sometimes more unsettling than the life prescribed by the normal daylight sense of reality. American writing has often been engaged with elements of mystery and the uncanny, and the American Dream has always had its corresponding nightmare. These stories feature haunted landscapes, places where violence and tragedy have left their marks: a man is subsumed by his vision of falling pine straw, a camera captures something the eye alone can't perceive, and a dead girl leads an unsuspecting boy to a killer's burial ground. In the title story, a Houston homicide detective is haunted, literally and figuratively, by the death of his partner. In order to redeem himself, he must hunt down her killer and confront his own complicity in her death. Written in the tradition of dark American masters like Hawthorne and Henry James, the tales in this collection occupy the uncertain borderland between the living and the dead." This is a print-on-demand title.