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.

Genre: Horror