Michael Sellars: 6 books

It was just the driving rain and the liquidity of the mud that made them look like a child’s footprints. Robert had no idea how long he had been following them, or even why. He wondered if he was simply keeping himself busy, distracting himself from the squealing in his ears, the festering wound...

At first, Jack had been convinced the thing was some twisted little urchin’s idea of a toy. But then he’d cut open its belly and something like semi-liquefied worms had glistened through the skewed slit of his inexpert incision...

There are days when Abigail doesn’t think about them at all, the Luminissmus, days when windows are windows and bottles are bottles, when glass is just glass. On those days, she cooks, cleans, shops, sends out job applications by the truckload and spends the remaining daylight hours in the cemetery....

At first, I thought it was a dead chick: one of those barely feathered near-foetuses you stumble across every now and then while out walking in the woods. I wondered how it had got there: in the attic, on top of a pile of newspaper clippings, themselves stacked upon a small tower of battered suitcases...

"... a terrific premise, and the story that ensues from this, aside from being a very taut and very well-written suspense piece, is also a reflection on what makes us real, on whether we are the sum of our memories or something more, on whether constructs can have an existence of their own—themes reminiscent of Philip K. Dick." From the Tangent Online review.

Timothy didn’t know what it was, the thing at the end of Elbow Street. It was big – bigger than a house, he didn’t doubt, if it were to unfurl to its full height – and it was made of something beginning with ‘c’.He didn’t know what it was, the creature at the end of the street, but he suspected it was there because of him.