In the Mean Time_Stories

“Paul Tremblay’s In the Mean Time is a dark, heart-twisting collection of short fiction which defies categorization and requires your complete attention. The children, parents, and teachers who inhabit these stories exist in the ways we all exist—through those old historical longings which are rarely answered. Tremblay offers no solutions, but in the end, somehow, we walk away with a greater understanding of ourselves. Or, at the very least, the kind of selves we are but rarely see.”

—Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent 

“Paul Tremblay creates images of terror and wonder. Lean, mean, and just a bit on the nasty side, he’s a hardnosed prose stylist with a heavyweight punch. Tremblay is a bona fide contender.”

—Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation

“In the Mean Time is a formidable collection, as disquieting as it is beautiful. They shock and they gleam, these stories, and the moods they provoke linger powerfully in the imagination: the dread of those who see the trouble coming and the strange relief of those upon whom it has already fallen.”

—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

“Rumor has it that the world will end in fire and ice, but then again, if Paul Tremblay is to be believed, it may conclude in preternaturally active plants, amusement parks, sudden brain aneurisms, and silence. In Mean Time, end of the world scenarios brush up against the traumas of more personal apocalypses. The resulting stories are as stressful and quietly traumatic as they are fluidly and lucidly written.”

—Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

“The power of these stories is that you think you’re reading them, that there’s that distance, but really you’re living them, experiencing them, and that’s how you remember them later. Not as something you read, but an event you lived.”

—Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theoryand  The Ones That Almost Got Away

“In the Mean Time is a miscellany of voices—witty, wise, weir