The past is never far behind. If we do not leave it, if we insist on carrying it with us to the end...that end is a monster. This stunning debut collection of dark, literary fiction drowns the reader in its themes of grief, regret, love, and hope. A family is torn apart by tragedy and misadventure, their future creaking under the weight of judgment. Old men play at being ghosts while a young boy sees real ones wherever he turns. A wandering immortal desperately seeks an end to his pain. Intimate, unflinching, and poignant, these eleven tales of the broken and the unmade include the two previously unpublished novellas, dragonland and This House is Not Haunted .