American Muse

"Sentence by sentence, this is some of the best old-fashioned storytelling I've read in ages." -Charles Ardai, author of Death Comes Too Late, Edgar and Shamus award winner, and editor for Hard Case Crime

When I was a kid, I bought most of my books at flea markets, anthologies like Alfred Hitchcock Presents..., but sometimes I'd find a book that included two novels by the same author, a Signet Double Mystery. Treasures! In American Muse, Starlite Pulp has rekindled my early joy of reading fiction by marrying one of my favorite forms (the novella) with four vastly different, accomplished writers of genre fiction. Whether it's the soaring prose of Brian Townsley's "Days of Bone, Nights of Ash," with passages that read like a virtuoso's guitar solo or the Elmore Leonard rope-a-dope prose of Manny Torres's "The Idiot Caper." In Alex Slusar's "The Hot Streak," a stranger comes to town in the form of an old cowboy movie star, while in Jean-Paul L. Garnier's "Black Trail Line," man versus nature in an opening scene that'll make you want to stay safely indoors. Gripping, smart, and thrilling - these are the kinds of electrifying stories that made me fall in love with reading in the first place. Buy a copy. Hell, buy two.

John McNally, author of The Pinned Butterfly (writing as Johnny Mack) & The Book of Ralph