Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.

A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.

Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?

And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.