An excerpt from Something Wicked

Come, do you hear it? The wind-murmuring in the eaves, scouring the bare trees. How it howls, almost musical, a harmony of old moans. The house seems to breathe, an invalid. Leave your scary movie marathon; this is better than TV. Leave the lights out. The blue glow follows you down the hall. Go to the window in the unused room, the cold seeping through the glass. The moon is risen, caught in nodding branches. The image holds you, black trunks backlit, one silver ray fallen across the deck, beckoning. It's a romance, this invitation to lunacy (lycanthropy, a dance with the vampire), elemental yet forbidden, tempting, something remembered in the blood.

Don't you ever wonder?

Don't you want to know?

Stewart O'Nan first achieved literary prominence with a variety of short fictions in such magazines as Northwest Review, Nebraska Review, Threepenny Review, and South Dakota Review. He had earned the Columbia Fiction Award in 1989. He gained an MFA in 1992 at Cornell University where he lectured in the English department. O’Nan gained book publication with the 1993 Drue Heinz literature prize collection In the Walled City from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Also in 1993 he received the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel. In the decade since, he has published such novels as The Speed Queen, Snow Angels, Everyday People, The Names of the Dead, and A World Away. In 1996 he was selected by Granta as one of America’s Best Young American Novelists His 2000 nonfiction volume The Circus Fire about the 1944 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey disaster in Hartford was a best-seller. He has edited or co-edited such volumes as The Vietnam Reader and On Writers and Writing by John Gardner. At the 2000 World Horror Convention in Denver, he received the IHG Award naming his historical reborn Gothic A Prayer for the Dying the best horror novel of the year. Born and reared in Pittsburgh, Stewart O’Nan now lives with his family in Connecticut. He continues to create a wide diversity of work. His most recent novel is, of course, The Night Country, the supernatural tale from which Something Wicked, this chapbook, is drawn.