Author Description

With Looking at the World with Broken Glass in My Eye, Mark Justice has given us a genuine gift; by turns funny, horrifying, heartbreaking, and just plain weird, this is a real showcase collection, and a feast for readers. You never know from one tale to the next what he s going to hit you with, and it s that very unpredictability that makes this book so much more than the mere sum of its often-brilliant parts. Justice has a keen and unflinching eye for the telling details of human (and un-human) behavior, and a poet s economy with words. There is not a wasted syllable to be found between these covers, and at times I felt as if I were being given a writing lesson. I cannot imagine anyone reading powerhouse stories such as Black Wings and the hands-down masterpiece Father s Day without feeling envious that they didn t write them. I expected this collection to be good; I didn t expect it to knock my socks off and leave me so wrung out. This is what short fiction should be but too often isn t. If you don t get this collection, your life is going to be all the poorer for it and I ve never said that about a book before. Gary A. Braunbeck, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award, and author of To Each Their Darkness and A Cracked and Broken Path