Strange Weather

Literary alchemist Joe Hill takes us beyond the ordinary in this quartet of thrilling, haunting, and entertaining novellas about remembering and forgetting, falling and fantasizing, homicide and helplessness, wind and rain, living and dying, dreams . . . and nightmares. Snapshot is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who is threatened by "The Phoenician," a tattooed thug with a Polaroid instant camera that erases memories, snap by snap. A young man takes to the skies for his first parachute jump . . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero's island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in Aloft . On a seemingly normal day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open in a downpour of nails--splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. Rain makes vivid this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads across the country and around the world. In Loaded, a Florida mall security guard courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun-rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it.