From the back cover
A young woman goes to colonial India to meet her fiancรฉโand finds a gruesome surprise...
And American journalist interviews and English murderer on death rowโwith alarming results...
A Greenwich Village painter-cum-drunk discovers the bizarre true subject of his latest work...
The hand of a sinner canโt be trustedโeven after itโs been severed from the arm...
And, in the chilling title story, and English landowner is driven to violence to protect his wifeโs bizarre sexual condition.
โThis collection is crowded with ghosts, hermaphrodites, civilized insect, angels, modern-day vampires and the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, a boot... IN prose that is rich and original, perverse, passionate, and grittily mellifluous, McGrath spins neatly finished old-fashioned tales for our times.โ โLeslie Carper, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
โMos of the [stories] long palpably for a gentler age, an age when the worldโs wildernesses still harbored unimaginable sights and sounds, and age when science had no yet explained away so much of the inexplicable and, especially, and age in which word-spinners could fashion filigrees of ornately layered prose without sounding arch or uppity or out-of-date... His gallows humor works wonderfully.โ โStephen Schiff, The New York Times Book Review
From Publishers Weekly
Mixing the macabre, the fantastical, the gruesome and the illusionary with a lush and word-loving style, McGrath conjures up an extravagant selection of worlds in which to set his modern, psychological stories. In "The Lost Explorer," a little girl finds an anthropologist from Africa dying of malaria in the garden behind her London home and manages to keep his existence, his death and burial a secret from her parents. "Blood Disease" describes the subterranean methods by which a group of English villagers afflicted with pernicious anemia alleviate the symptoms of their affliction. In "Marmilion" a photographer specializing in monkeys spends a few harrowing nights in the ruins of an old Louisiana mansion, while "The Hand of the Wanker," set in an East Village nightclub, is a cautionary tale: not even cutting off this hand will hinder its compulsive activity. With elegance, humor and respect for the dark side of human nature, McGrath also offers an angel, an hermaphrodite and the ghosts of the world's great psychoanalysts in the polished and entertaining, eminently readable stories in his first collection.