A redemptive seriocomic love story filled with country music, the ghosts of Halloween, and an ironic brand of down-home religion. Newly divorced and feeling the pain of separation from his family, Hud Smith channels his regret into writing country-western songs, contemplating life on the lam with his 8-year-old daughter, and searching cryptic postcards for news of his teenage son who has run off with The Daughters of God, an alternative Gospel-punk band of growing fame. Then he finds himself inching toward reconciliation with his ex, tossing his whole talent for misery into question as they...

The lives of a failed erotic novelist, a hostess of prim sex-toy parties, an artist and a
bookshop owner pursued by a demented if harmless stalkerall members of the artsy
crowd in Omaha, Nebraskacollide one snowy winter evening, the week before
Valentines Day. These wives and lovers plot to hold onto families, friendships and
personal lives during an extravagant evening of wildy innocent sex parties, and may
only be saved by their own children, a timely fire, and a return to their senses.
Ashley, a frustrated novelist, teaches a community college class in the writing...

In Schafferts seriocomic debut, two sisters on the cusp of womanhood struggle to understand their fathers suicide as well as their mothers abandonment of them many years earlier.

An 83-year-old obituary writer for a struggling, small-town newspaper finds herself embroiled in intrigue, stumbling onto the story of her career: a country girl has gone missing, perhaps whisked away by an itinerant aerial photographer. Or so it seems. It all could be simply a hoax, or a delusion, the child and child-thief invented from the desperate imagination of a lonely, lovelorn farm woman. The fragility of childhood, the strength of family, and the powerful rumor mills of small, rural towns--The Coffins of Little Hope tells the story of characters caught in the intricately woven webs...

A farmer perishing under a fallen tractor makes a last stab at philosophizing: There was nothing dead that was ever beautiful. It is a sentiment belied not only by the strange beauty in his story but also in the rough lives and deaths, small and large, that fill these haunting tales. Pulp-fiction grim and gritty but with the rhythm and resonance of classic folklore, these stories take place in a world of shadowy figures and childhood fears, in a countryside peopled by witches and skinflints, by men and women mercilessly unforgiving of one another s trespasses, and in nights prowled by wolves...