With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it.

The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.

I was once told by a very well-respected editor, "Category horror is about good vs. evil, that's all it is." And I thought, "That's why it's no good. That's why I find that stuff unreadable." One is looking for something that's a little more emotionally complex and nuanced.

On gym days, I don't get to my desk until 4 in the afternoon, and everything except bedtime and the appointment with the liquid narcotic is pushed back a bit.

What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.