Reptile House

800x600 Winner of The BOA Short Fiction PrizeA Paris Review “Best Book of 2015” The fascinating characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, derail their lives with desires and delusions, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Probing the dark underbelly of human nature and want, Robin McLean’s stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us. Praise for Reptile House “Once you’ve read these nine stories, forgetting them is as unlikely as discovering the end-point of pi. Kissing cousins to George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and perhaps even Don DeLillo, they are nonetheless powered by a distinctive new voice. McLean dives fearlessly through the Looking Glass; she scrubs the psyche raw, pe