Voodoo Heart

Scott Snyder's protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or anemployee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder's wondrous imagination there's a thin membrane betweenthe whimsical and the disturbing: the unlikely affair between a famous actress-in hiding after surgery--and a sporting goods salesman takes an ominous turn just as she begins to heal; an engagedcouple's relationship is fractured when one of them becomes obsessed with an inmate at the women's prison next door.

Dark, funny, powerful, this debut collection underscores theremarkable gifts of a fiercely original young writer. "From the Hardcover edition."