“Impeccable in craft…Ingalls dwells on thwarted love, poisonous secrets and people who meddle in each other’s lives with a calculated cold-bloodedness that’s at once thrilling and horrific…Ingalls remind[s] us of just how dangerous and exciting the form can be.” —Salon.com, Top 10 Book of 2005

“With her creepy, suspenseful stories of desperate people in tight situations, Rachel Ingalls could be the next Patricia Highsmith.” —Salon.com

“Ingalls conjures a calmly demonic America for the stories and novellas in this brutally beautiful collection…An unmooring vision of hell that rises just as your defenses go down.” —The Village Voice, Top Shelf 2005

“The hair-whitening jolt has become an Ingalls trademark, and it electrifies her new collection…Gothic and ferocious, these are the fables we can’t stop reading, even as events take turn after turn for the worse.” —The Village Voice

“Filled with surprising plot twists, guided by the frequent interventions of the deus ex machina that arises from the author’s imagination, they keep us steadily turning the pages.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Elements of Alfred Hitchcock, Roald Dahl and Shirley Jackson are at play in Ingalls’ creepy-quirky tales. Still, she has a flavor distinctly her own…She’s an American original.” —Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

“Ingalls’ craft is in synthesizing a lifetime of human experience into chilling tableaux of memory, grief, madness, recovery, passion, regret and horror.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A perfect book for a dark winter night.” —Shelf Awareness

“Substantial work from a quirky, under-appreciated writer.” —Kirkus

“Delicious…Ingalls’ command of her varied worlds – from bucolic small town to renegade postwar countryside – is impressive.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ingalls’ prose takes the reader seamlessly from the real to the surreal in these stories that burrow in memory.” —Booklist