The Ones Who Are Waving

With his latest collection, critically acclaimed and award-winning storyteller Glen Hirshberg offers a vivid travelogue through landscapes both geographical and emotional, on the way to destinations as wondrous as they are unsettling: - Snowy St. Petersburg, Russia, where bears appear in the strangest places; - The broiling Inland Empire east of Los Angeles where an unlikely cricket match gets interrupted by menaces spectral and otherwise; - Earthquake-riddled Tokyo, where reality itself is cracking; - The eastern Montana plains of Hirshberg's celebrated Halloween tale, Mr. Dark's Carnival, where the stories people tell prove as harrowing as the infamous Carnival itself. At least, until the night the Carnival comes back...This volume also contains three linked adventures about The Collector, who trades in cryptic experiences at the edges of dreams: a grocery store in the desolate east of New Mexico which houses a collection too disturbing even for him; a marine repository for legendary, long-lost musical recordings; a bakery whose proprietor has developed a dessert a little too tasty for eating.Having circled the globe, the book returns home to conclude with the luminous title story, a meditation on the ways fiction transforms writers and audience alike, inspired by the author's own performing experiences with the touring ghost story troupe known as The Rolling Darkness Revue.Here, then, is a wanderer's lament. A ballad of discovery and its costs. A whistling stroll in the shadows with The Ones Who Are Waving.