Tom Howard's
award-winning debut short story collection, Fierce Pretty Things, won accolades
for blending "raw emotion with surreal forays into the supernatural and
metaphysical." With his second collection, Invisibilia, Howard takes the reader
on a mesmerizing ride through a haunting, haunted landscape of children,
drifters, soldiers, lovers, and ghosts, and the unseen forces that shape their
lives.
Two sisters and
their parents slowly disappear, each in their own way, after a universe-shaking
decision; a young solder returns broken from Vietnam to his hometown, where he
must follow a set of mystifying instructions as part of a peculiar homecoming ritual;
the father of an emotionally estranged teen tries to reconnect with his son
through the wonder of nature and the spectacle of a bloody, nightmarish parade;
a sweet but disfigured actor, renowned for the monsters he once played, seeks
one final, redemptive role at the end of his career; and otherworldly
scavengers haunt a city's rooftops, feeding on the memories and the stories of
the dead.
In these deftly
crafted narratives, Tom Howard opens a window into a world that's at times
wildly strange, funny, sad, and absurd, but always achingly, helplessly human.
