A starving family in the 1600s is forced to kill and eat a strange blue animal, with hideous consequences. An escaped prisoner finds himself newly imprisoned by the thing to which he has been betrothed. A boy set on losing his virginity loses much more than that. A man returning to his hometown to discover the magic of his youth finds instead the wretched personification of that harrowing time. A homeless man squats in a tomb, much to the chagrin of its original occupant . . . In this collection, Joshua Rex, acclaimed author of The Inamorta and The Descent and Other Strange Stories, presents a gallery of the monstrous: fifteen raw stories about terror, grief, predators, and horrors historical and present. Lurking in these pages are monsters you never knew were there-creatures and phantoms and foreshadowings crouching in your future, in your worst dreams, in the corners of the ceiling in your room.