Description
"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book."
–David Cronenberg
Originally Published under the name Sarah Sparrow, Bruce Wagner's A Guide for Murdered Children is terrifying, thoroughly original, and hauntingly written.
Ex-NYPD detective Willow Wylde is fresh out of rehab and finally able to find a job running a Cold Case squad in suburban Detroit. When the two rookie cops assigned to him take an obsessive interest in a decades-old disappearance of a brother and sister, Willow begins to suspect something out of the ordinary is afoot. He uncovers a series of church basement AA-type meetings made up of the slain innocents and a new way of looking at life, death, murder—and missed opportunities—is revealed to him.
A Guide for Murdered Children is a genre-busting, mind-bending twist on the fine line between the ordinary . . . and the unfathomable.
Authors
Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” I’m Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding), Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist Chrysanthemum Palace. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s film Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. In 1993, Wagner wrote and created the visionary mini-series Wild Palms for producer Oliver Stone and co-wrote (with Ullman) three seasons the acclaimed Tracey Ullman’sState of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.
Reviews
"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book."
–David Cronenberg
“If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagner’s work, it is his language that has kept me hooked… Marveling at his comic and linguistic gifts, at his sheer storytelling verve – his ability to handle large ensembles of characters and keep numerous narrative balls in the air while at the same time shooting flames from his mouth and balancing a naked lady on his nose – I nevertheless introduce Wagner’s work to my writing students with a caution: Don’t try this at home.”— Sigrid Nunez
"Bruce Wagner is Hollywood’s master of satire."--Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."--Salman Rushdie
"[Wagner's The Empty Chair] would make a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace." --Dani Shapiro, The New York Time Book Review
"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."--Emma Cline
"To say that [Maps to the Stars] deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair deglamorized the meat-packing industry... the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters." --Francine Prose
"[Dead Stars is] A Rabelaisian masterpiece." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Bruce Wagner's stories about Hollywood are the best I've read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West." --Terry Southern
"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates." --John Updike
