NIGHT MOVES: A COLLECTION OF THE BIZARRE, THE TRAGIC, AND THE HORRIFYING BY MARY SANGIOVANNI

BY JOHN BODEN 

There are signature sounds in music. You know when you hear say, a Rolling Stones song the moment you first hear that skronk from Keith RIchards guitar pair up with the sneering vocals of Jagger. You know that the sound of Willie Nelson's ragged acoustic is going to be like a thorn in the paw of your soul. We have those voices in writers as well, and Mary SanGiovanni possesses one of them.

Hers is a beautiful meld of open emotional honesty, both fragile and fierce that wraps around events dark and sinister like a garland. The fact that she chose to name her collection after a song by one of the most signature singer of all time, is pretty telling and really shows you what you're in for. A night ride in a car with the windows down and the shadows pushing the hair from your eyes so you can see what's ahead of you, whether you want to or not. In this treasure chest of tales you will encounter scary things. Sad things. Often in the same story.

We open with a story called "The Mime"  In which something old and evil dwells under an old theatre and tries to work its way out.  In "Shadow Puppets" a mother finds that grief is often a monster of its own making and can work magic and open doors. "Baby Teeth" is a strange tale of body horror and discomfort.  "The Last Things To Go" is a fresh and heart-wrenching tale of loss, literal and metaphoric and will leave you gasping for air.

There is not a bad story in this collection. I have chosen to touch on the ones I liked most but that, in no way, implies I didn't like the rest. These are stories that will linger.  Like scars.
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Night Moves is available from Post Mortem Press.

From award-winning author Mary SanGiovanni comes a collection of some of her best short fiction to date. NIGHT MOVES is a frightening journey through the shadowed and often deadly lands that overlap our world...and others. Love and loss, self-respect and self-image, obsession and compulsion, and the things that drive people slowly insane carve a path through the darkness:
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