Douglas Clegg, Wild Things

Wild Things

Douglas Clegg

Cemetery Dance, August 2006, $20.00, 104 pp.

ISBN 1587671565

"The Wolf". A wolf comes down the mountains to eat the sheep. Hunting parties can't find it, so a rancher hires a professional hunter to kill the wolf. The hunter is accompanied by a young man who feels he owes the rancher. The hunter describes the differences between wolves and sheep. This is an allegorical tale that can be applied to different kinds of humans.

"A Madness of Starlings". A man takes an abandoned baby starling bird into his home, and his family nurtures it until it is ready to fly solo. The boys don't want to let it go, but the man insists, yet when he does he misses the fledgling. He becomes obsessed with birds to the point it interferes with his human relations, to the point he dives deeper into the world of birds and lets go of his normal life. This is an exciting tale of one man's decent into madness.

"The American". At ae caf in Rome, a man tells the people at his table that he tried to commit suicide because his lover didn't love him. He told his audience the man did terrible things to him, and now he wants the American to kill someone. The people at the table advise him to leave the man who forces him to do these horrific things. They depart and, and the American stays in the shadows following two of them. This story is scary; not in a supernatural kind of way, but in a horror of the human kind setting.

"The Dark Game". A nineteen year old American is taken prisoner of war by the enemy and is tortured. He escapes by playing the Dark Game his mother taught him, that allowed him to travel in his mind to places where he feels no pain. After a time, the brainwashing starts, but he uses the Dark Game to avoid being turned. His captors think he is on their side until he shows them differently. This dark and Gothic tale is chilling.

These four short stories demonstrate why Douglas Clegg is such a brilliant storyteller of horror tales, both supernatural and of the atrocities humans carry out.