Tooth and Claw

This new collection of short stories from T.C. Boyle finds him at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are the stories of the drop-outs, deadbeats and kooks of small-time America. The characters in "Tooth and Claw" are attracted to extremes: the man who shares his apartment with a wildcat won in a drunken bet; the nature buffs who find themselves in a vicious blizzard; the drive-time shock jock, hallucinating with sleep deprivation for a publicity stunt; the suburban woman who joins a pack of dogs, eating rabbits and baying at the moon. Nature, in T.C. Boyle's world, proves to be a sinister and unpredictable force, but here too are moments of reprieve, where the meteor hurtling through space maybe isn't heading straight for you. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, T.C. Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America with the familiarity of an expert cartographer.