In the Mean Time

by Paul Tremblay

Overview

A history teacher begins his unorthodox senior course with clips from an ominous surveillance video, causing a student's home life to deteriorate along with the lessons.

A girl with a second head that changes into different historical and fictional identities tries to find her father while figuring out how to handle Mom and the book club.

A blog documents society's slow, unexplained, but inexorable end, or is it only a collection of pixel-sized paranoia?

A once-awkward teen holes up in a kiddie-themed amusement park after the end of the world, and schemes to take Cinderella's Castle by force.

This collection by Paul G. Tremblay (author of The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland) features fifteen stories of fear and paranoia, stories of apocalypses both societal and personal, and stories of longing and coping.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926851914
Publisher:	ChiZine Publications
Publication date:	04/24/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	813 KB
Age Range:	15 Years

About the Author

Paul Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland, and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, and the short story collections Compositions for the Young and Old and In the Mean Time. He has published two novellas, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Five Chapters.com, and Best American Fantasy 3. He is the co-editor of four anthologies including Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories (with John Langan).

Table of Contents

The Teacher 13

The Two-Headed Girl 24

The Strange Case of Nicholas Thomas: An Excerpt from A History of the Longesian Library 44

Feeding the Machine 61

Figure 5 72

Growing Things 83

Harold the Spider Man 100

Rhymes with Jew 105

The Marlborough Man Meets the End 118

The Blog at the End of the World 121

The People Who Live Near Me 135

There's No Light Between Floors 148

Headstones in Your Pocket 157

It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks 175

We Will Never Live in the Castle 191

Editorial Reviews

Tremblay (No Sleep Till Wonderland) collects 15 world-ending whimpers that probe disintegrating, tormented personalities, both individual and societal. Many of the stories are seen through the troubled eyes of children and adolescents. A girl's second head channels notable women of history in "The Two-Headed Girl"; a boy narrates environmental disaster in "The Marlborough Man Meets the End"; and a disturbed teen guides readers on a terrifying tour through a decaying amusement park in "We Will Never Live in the Castle." Tremblay turns childhood's creepy-crawlies into grim glimpses of possibly well-intentioned but ultimately fatal government machinations ("Rhymes with Jew") and personal choices that bedevil humanity into self-destruction ("Headstones in Your Pocket"). Bitter and depressing, these inchoate slices of the apocalypse can only be tolerated in small doses. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly