THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
A Shirley Jackson Award Nominee
“Miskowski peels back another dark layer of secrets in Skillute. Look if you dare. Family secrets are dangerous, especially when they’re not yours.” —Sarah Read, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Bone Weaver’s Orchard
In this companion novella to the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated The Worst Is Yet to Come, Roland and his sister Pigeon are the kind of people most visitors to the small town of Skillute never notice: ordinary, hardworking folk who keep to themselves. They obey the speed limit and pay their taxes on time. Yet something isn’t quite normal about these adult siblings who perform strange rituals in the basement and tend to their garden late at night.
To their affluent new neighbors, caught up in a fantasy of pastoral family life, Roland and Pigeon might as well be invisible. Old acquaintances take them for granted, as though they’re part of the fragmented landscape. In truth, no one knows what secret worlds they may inhabit, whether stalking the living or speaking to the dead.
“To re-enter S.P. Miskowski’s Skillute Cycle is always much like plunging head-first into a mad person’s dream joined already in progress—something sly and malign by nature, perspective continually set askew, poisonous and hallucinogenic as a mould-laced ‘shrooms trip and ‘magical’ in ways that would make any Disney witch puke on contact. Sitting slantwise to the action of her previous novella The Worst Is Yet To Come, The Best Of Both Worlds sinks us deep into the hidden-in-plain-sight lives of Pigeon and Roland Dempsey, passionately attached half-siblings whose adult lives have been spent carrying out anti-clockwise supernatural rituals designed to protect them against the sort of abuse which once bonded them together. But as the rest of the Cycle has already taught us, there’s nothing in those dense, unforgiving Washington woods that wants to help anybody, no matter how much flattery and flowerbeds full of corpses you might offer it. This is brilliant, terse and beautifully dread-full writing from an author whose best just keeps on getting better.”—Gemma Files, author of Experimental Film
The Best of Both Worlds is a companion novella to the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated The Worst Is Yet to Come.
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Product Details:
Author: S.P. Miskowski
Publication Date: May 1, 2020
Price:
Paperback: $9.95 plus $3.00 shipping, handling and sales tax. Total Price $12.95
Electronic: $4.95
Print Length: 80 pages
Publisher: Trepidatio Publishing, an imprint of JournalStone