Vulture Gold: Stories - Paperback

by Micah Dean Hicks (Author)

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

Welcome to a dark country of sadness and wonder. Where a wedding dress turns a reluctant bride into a flock of birds, and families put on their wolf coats before devouring one another. These growling, prickly-feathered stories blur the lines between human and animal, living and dead. Teenage spirits are condemned to drive around their hometown forever. Five brothers learn that they were once crows. The bank hires a man to go into foreclosed houses and kill their monsters. Two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead. Plumbers kidnap mermaids trapped in a city sewer system. A mockingbird sings a woman's sins. A boy with a single swan's wing yearns to fly. And watching over all of them is the queen of the dead, who sends her vulture men to scavenge the bones. The characters in these modern fairy tales challenge expectations and norms in a dark and magical shared world.

Author Biography

Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones and the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, the New York Times, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Gulf Coast. He teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of South Florida.