In the Mean Time

By Paul Tremblay

A history teacher begins his unorthodox senior course with clips from an ominous surveillance video, causing a student's home life to deteriorate along with the lessons.

A girl with a second head that changes into different historical and fictional identities tries to find her father while figuring out how to handle Mom and the book club.

A blog documents society's slow, unexplained, but inexorable end, or is it only a collection of pixel-sized paranoia?

A once-awkward teen holes up in a kiddie-themed amusement park after the end of the world, and schemes to take Cinderella's Castle by force.

This collection by Paul G. Tremblay (author of The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland) features fifteen stories of fear and paranoia, stories of apocalypses both societal and personal, and stories of longing and coping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ChiZine Publications
• Release date: Apr 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781926851914

Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.

Reviews for In the Mean Time

[tobinelliott · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Damn, this collection is disturbing.

Tremblay--who is quickly climbing my list of favourite authors--serves up a series of bleak, dreadful stories. Some, such as the brilliant and terrible opener, The Teacher will grab you by the face and not let go. There are some other standouts, like Growing Things, the twisted There's No Light Between the Floors, and my personal favourite, It's Against The Law To Feed The Ducks that blew my mind.

Of course, like any anthology, there were others that simply didn't work as well, but that's also a tall order going up against the stories above.

An excellent collection, but one to be read a story at a time, with some reflection time in between. These stories will disturb you. In a good way.