INTRODUCTION, by Mary Wickizer Burgess

There, is, perhaps, no speculative writer of today who is more innovative in her themes and characterizations than A. R. Morlan. Wildside Press now has collected a sampling of her most innovative creations which will startle you and horrify you by turns…and may even make you smile.

Beginning with “Garbage Day at Ewerton,” a strange, yet compelling take on parenting, and ending with “Street Coffins,” a horrible ending to the same story, the following pages are crammed with Morlan’s visions of great imagination and stunning vistas of beauty and terror. These tales are filled with characters very much like people you have known all your life…neighbors…the man on the street…your lover or your child—yet, with twists of fate and irony—they emerge from the shadows as beings totally unlike anyone alive on this Earth today.

The magnificent elegaic fantasies, “The German Lady,” “Duet on Thin Ice,” “The Second Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” “Dora’s Trunk” and, most especially, “The Great Milk-White Eye of God,” are quiet, character-driven portraits of unusual, yet compelling individuals—not quite of another world—yet definitely not of this time or place.

Old souls make dangerous liaisons with everyday folk, with unexpected consequences, in “…And the Horses Hiss at Midnight,” The Uppyroake Kamikaze and the Virgin Shredder,” and “The Time of the Bleeding Pumpkins.”

Morlan’s infatuation with the feline kingdom comes across with amusing and unpredictable charm, in “The Hemingway Kittens, The Cat-Tracker Lady of Asad Alley,” and “No Heaven Will Not Ever Heaven Be…” and her love of all animals is attested to further with “Hunger,” “The Cuttlefish,” and “’Rillas,” futuristic takes on man’s ever-evolving relationship with creatures great and small.

For those with a science-fictional bent, you could look no further than “Contingencies and Penti-Lope-Lope” (with Morlan’s pal, John S. Postovit) and “Above the Capitans, South of Corona, Near Arroyo del Macho.” And for something in-between the here-and-now and the not-quite-there-yet, the two most unusual titles in this grouping must be “The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel” and “Showdown Between the Unnatural-Born Chimera and the Shadowfox Griefer”—titles which make perfect sense, within the context of the stories.

Morlan will never be known as a “children’s writer,” but she most definitely has written about children. In fact, children, as a theme and as characters, drive much of her fiction. For something completely different in the area of “kiddie lit,” take a walk on the wild side with “At Funland by the Swings, with Big Chuck,” “Decorating Dead People Under the Lawns,” and “Between Long. 150 W. and 90 W., One Degree Above Hell.” No lullabyes here!

Now. Open these pages and prepare to be amazed, intrigued—and utterly charmed.