Pregnant with Ideas

These tales by Eric Stringer range from the merely odd to the fantastic, from the tragic to the magical. In one story you'll accompany a Cajun on a single-minded mission into the backwoods of Louisiana on a deep, humid night. In another, you'll witness the life or death struggle between a fifteen year old boy and the mean drunk who's been his oppressor for years. There's also a story about writing and the writer stalking his mentor; a job that very few could do but for which many would apply (wanna be a Mind Cleaner?); and a child's tale of a favorite pasttime: crushing bugs. Eric also offers up the ground rules for getting by when your shadow is doing odd things, writes of the passion between Giacomo Casanova and the one woman he has loved down through the ages, and wonders aloud what might happen if the characters in a story grew tired of a hack writer and banded together against him. Finally he takes the reader on a hectic road trip in "Interference," and ends with "A Natural Study of the Scream." All in all, this collection provides a very satisfying, if extremely unusual, reading experience. The reader will remember these stories.