Bob Mustin

Collateral Damage and Stories Bob Mustin

The stories in this collection examine the ways we use imagination to set aside human anguish and move on with our lives. Here baseball opens a passageway to life after death, obsession transforms romantic complexities into a corrupted form of happiness, conquest and empire begets guilt and a healing sacrifice, and the recipients of medical technology deal with the well-meant horrors inflicted on them. In Collateral Damage, the collection's centerpiece, writer John Fromme suffers a mental upset caused by his refusal to confront a family murder he witnessed as a child. Quirky, richly imagined characters populate these stories, inviting readers to measure them against their own lives and to want to read these stories again and again.