Cages

Thanks to the flood of 96 I don't have a copy of my collection Cages. I needed to see if one of the local libraries had one so I could copy story of it. I'd either forgotten or never saw the PW review of it. It was on line with info about the availability of the book. Actually the reviewer does a good job of pointing out my influences here. The sense of shock however predicted what was to come. (BTW I consider the PW notice a pretty good review; it was considered and even-handed.) I thought a few of the later reviewers would show up up out here with a lynch mob. I'd never thought of myself as a shocking writer though I do remember that with the title story Cages a prominent magazine editor told me that if he published it he'd lose ten thousand subscribers. I didn't make any friends with this book. One newspaper reviewer called it "The most disgusting book I've read in years."

Cages : a collection of stories
Gorman, Edward.

In this mixed bag of 20 stories and one novella, most of which have appeared in hardcover collections or SF and mystery magazines, Gorman (Prisoners and Other Stories), who describes himself as inhabiting ``the lower depths of American paperback publishing,'' shows off his range in an array of tales with admitted debts to, among others, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, John D. MacDonald and even Vladimir Nabokov (the noirish, Lolita-derived ``The End of It All''). Leading off the collection is the novella ``Moonchasers,'' a work reminiscent of King's heartfelt boyhood idyll ``The Body.'' Further along, wisely wedged into the middle of the collection, is the title story, the most original-and most ghastly-story here, a deeply unpleasant tale of genetic mutants arising from our pollution of nature. Gorman's stories often glow bizarrely, even his semi-surreal westerns, but he has a knack for writing tales that offend mainstream sensibilities-which is perhaps why his work sometimes appears in limited editions like this one. Limited edition of 500 signed copies. Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information