Ape in the Ring: & Other Tales of the Macabre and Uncanny by Douglas Ford

From the author of The Reattachment comes a frightening and twisted collection of stories that demonstrates Douglas Ford’s imagination at its best.In these stories, a woman uncovers the buried memory of how she once disappeared inside the house of a murderer; a father waits and waits for his son to come out of a playground structure, unprepared for what finally does emerge; a group of foster children play an unconventional form of divination while protecting a secret together; the closet of a hotel room hides an unspeakable voyeur; and in the title story, a carnival offers ritualized combat with something that may or not be an ape.Douglas Ford wields language like a sinister surgeon with a night-black scalpel. These stories cut down to the bone, exposing the darkness that lies just beneath the surface of our everyday world. This collection is a midnight carnival of dark wonders, terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. –Bram Stoker Award-Winning Author, Tim WaggonerApe in the Ring