Things Left Behind [Hardcover]

Gary Braunbeck (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 570 pages
• Publisher: Cemetery Dance Pubns (January 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1881475212
• ISBN-13: 978-1881475217
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 9.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,420,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gary A. Braunbeck is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 20 books -- evenly divided between novels and short-story collections; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Czech, and Polish. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications.

He was born in Newark, Ohio; the city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his novels and stories. The Cedar Hill stories are collected in Graveyard People, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming The Carnival Within, all published by Earthling Books.

His fiction has received several awards, including 5 Bram Stoker Awards: the first for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for "Duty"; the second -- also for Superior Achievement in Short Story -- in 2005 for "We Now Pause for Station Identification"; his collection Destinations Unknown won the Stoker for Superior Achievement in Fiction Collection in 2006; and 2007 saw Gary winning 2 Stoker Awards; the first for co-editing the anthology 5 Strokes to Midnight, and the second for his novella "Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway." His novella "Kiss of the Mudman" received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005.

As an editor, Gary completed the latest installment of the Masques anthology series created by Jerry Williamson, Masques V, after Jerry became too ill to continue.

He also served a term as president of the Horror Writers Association. He is married to Lucy Snyder, a science fiction/fantasy writer, and they reside together in Columbus, Ohio.

Gary is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania, where he teaches in an innovative MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

His nonfiction writing book Fear In A Handful Of Dust: Horror As A Way Of Life has been used as a text by several college writing classes. (A revised and expanded edition of the book will be coming out in late 2010/early 2011, from Apex Books.) Gary has taught writing seminars and workshops around the country on topics such as short story writing, characterization, and dialogue.

His work is often praised for its depth of emotion and characterization, as well as for its refusal to adhere to any genre tropes; some joke that the term "cross-genre fiction" may have been invented to describe his work -- a rumor he does everything in his power to propagate.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Early Braunbeck, October 22, 2007

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Things Left Behind (Hardcover)

NOTE: This review was written circa 1997.

Widely touted by writers as diverse as William F. Nolan, Yvonne navarro, Thomas Monteleone, Elizabeth Massie, J. N. Williamson and Ed Gorman as one of the most promising young writers to emerge this decade, Gary Braunbeck does much to earn their praise in this imprressive debut collection. Things Left Behind features highly readable dark fantasies, modern fables which provide glimpses into the darker side of human existence. A very talented writer, Braunbeck shows a real knack for conveying the pain and pathos of his characters. Displaying impressive range and versatility, he grabs readers by the hand and takes them on a tour of broken lives and ruined dreams.

There are 22 stones in this volume, each bleaker than the last. The collection is framed by the tale of Geoff Conover, a young man whose life is turned upside down when he learns a dark secret about his past. Geoff appears three times in the collection, in the beginning, middle and end, seemingly passing through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of denial (in "Dreams and Permanence"), anger (in "Frozen Mammoth), and, finally, acceptance (in "A Sort of Homecoming"). Each new tale develops themes broached in its predecessor, all the while steering readers toward a new stage in Geoff's personal development. Indeed, the stories are so tightly interwoven that Geoff occasionally refers to happenings in other stories as historical events.

Each story is followed by a "fragment", shorter pieces which, for the most part, appear to be exercises in creating moods. Like their longer cousins, these vignettes amplify lessons learned in previous stories while building toward the payoff of the last tale in the volume, "Searching for Survivors," where readers learn the sad truth about Geoff's early childhood.

As horror aficionado Matt Schwartz said in his review of this collection, "Things Left Behind is more than a collection of short stories, it loosely forms a coherent storyline that runs throughout the sizable tome." It also provides glimpses of where this noteworthy writer has been and gives clues as to where he's going. Consider it a milestone in Braunbeck's career, a snapshot of where he stands at age 35--a talented, quirky writer in control of his craft, a writer whose voice and vision evokes raw, unfiltered emotion and creates a sense of unrelenting dread. Braunbeck is poised on the edge of a promising career--it will be interesting to see where he goes from here.