From the back cover A young woman goes to colonial India to meet her fiancé—and finds a gruesome surprise... And American journalist interviews and English murderer on death row—with alarming results... A Greenwich Village painter-cum-drunk discovers the bizarre true subject of his latest work... The hand of a sinner can’t be trusted—even after it’s been severed from the arm... And, in the chilling title story, and English landowner is driven to violence to protect his wife’s bizarre sexual condition. “This 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.” —Leslie Carper, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “Mos of the [stories] long palpably for a gentler age, an age when the world’s 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and age in which word-spinners could fashion filigrees of ornately layered prose without sounding arch or uppity or out-of-date...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.” —Stephen Schiff, The New York Times Book Review From Publishers WeeklyMixing 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.

From Publishers WeeklyWitty, weird and highly enjoyable, this gothic British tale is aptly titled. The set-up is macabre: a distinguished paleontologist is brain-damaged and slowly turning into a vegetable. He cannot speak, but narrates an interior monologue of all he sees and hears: a lot of sexual shenanigans and a particularly grisly murder, all centered around "Fledge," the butler, who has ambitions. The stylistic joke is that all these horrors take place in a quaint, genteel English country setting, where the village is "Pock-on-the-Fling," the pub, "The Hodge and Purlet" and the barrister, "Sir Fleckley Tome." However deadly the deed, the language is always decorous and impeccably mannered. The result is strangely hilarious--as if a Stephen King story were being told in the manner of a latter-day Anthony Trollope. From Scientific AmericanMagnificently grim ... [McGrath] serves up this cold slice of modern Gothic with the deranged relish of a Poe but also the acrid irony of a Waugh.

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.Amazon.com ReviewI cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a . . . thick, slow discharge I recognized as blood. A wry, mesmerizing tale of madness in a London suffused with the smells of jellied eels, leaking gas, outdoor lavatories and furry feet. Spider obsesses about wetness and fire and sexuality, about "this business of the thought patterns" and "the dead eyes" of his father and a woman named Hilda. Somewhere inside Spider's internal web of illusions lurks the truth about his mother's death. From Publishers WeeklyIn this "closely observed study of madness, memory and storytelling" the delusional Dennis Clegg, aka Spider, returns to his London neighborhood after 20 years in a mental hospital and insists that his father, not he, murdered his mother. "An admixture of Poe and the comic vulnerabilities of Beckett, this tale lingers long and disturbingly in the mind," said PW.