An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of despairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways.

In these ten finely crafted and unsettling slipstream stories, Maxwell interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from a world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent.

More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links?environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions can corrupt or sacrifice those within them; the interpretations and recording of past events by unreliable narrators; and the pervasive, irreducible weirdness of existence.

Susan Maxwell is an independent author and scholar who has had short stories and poetry published in magazines and anthologies; has published a short story collection (Fluctuation in Disorder) independently; has had one novel (Good Red Herring) published by Little Island Books, and a further three (Hollowmen, And the Wildness, and A Wild Goose Hunt) published independently; has served on fiction and non-fiction juries for the British Fantasy Awards; has a PhD in Archival Science and writes on themes related to archives and fiction; reviews regularly for Inis (the magazine of Children's Books Ireland); is influenced most by speculative and modernist fiction, being particularly fond of Flann O'Brien, Calvino, Beckett, and Woolf.

When not writing, or painting, or being an archivist, the author can be found in the vegetable patch, listening to music, reading books, watching old detective series, or catching up on sleep.