One rain-lashing night, Melanie Truslow's father--a former French officer in Vietnam--fell off the McClenny Pier near his North Florida home and was drowned. Now his large house, and its ghosts, are hers. As she begins to settle into her new surroundings, she tries to understand the accident of his death and to reconstruct the life of the man who had left her mother before Melanie was born. Her only clues lie within the house's filthy basement--a room with blacked-out windows, chicken bones and cigarette butts strewn on the floor, and stacks of homemade pornographic videos narrated by a...

Choirboys await the return of a Mexican bandit to their church-despite the fact that he has been dead for 100 years . . . An old drunk in Alaska invents a super alter ego to battle the bigotry and unfeeling he sees all around him . . . The mind of a two-bit comedian is inhabited by the soul of his agent-who he has just murdered . . . An obsessed policeman rents the apartment of a woman who has committed the most terrible of crimes . . . A beggar girl in Bombay is given a shining treasure that she alone can use . . . These and other characters come vibrantly alive in the 25th Anniversary...