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It is hard to say how it started - all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in 'The Silent Cradle' - but soon none of the O'Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In 'Max Haunting' a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have 'sold out' rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother's cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts.

Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.

Table of Contents:

• The Silent Cradle - (1983) - shortstory
• Max Haunting - (1986) - shortstory
• Tuning - (1985) - shortstory
• The Window Jesus - (1985) - shortstory
• River Baby - (1986) - shortstory
• The Fisherman - (1986) - shortstory
• Belling Martha - (1983) - novelette
• Greek - (1983) - shortstory
• Petit Mal - (1986) - shortstory
• Her Furry Face - (1983) - shortstory

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1983. The story is also included in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois, Alien Sex (1990), edtied by Ellen Datlow and The Apes of Wrath (2013), edited by Richard Klaw. It is collected in Faces (1986).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared on Sci Fiction, March 14, 2001. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations (Waldrop, 2003).

Nicholas Dal, a semi-drunken recluse, is a tele-empath who experiences the emotions of those around him. His family have fled from Russia to the USA to escape the deadly curse but to no avail. Now a psychiatrist is onto him and his feelings for a fellow student threaten to destroy his sanity.

WFA nominated short story. It origianlly appeared in the anthology Shadows 6 (1983), edited by Charles L. Grant. Thes story can also be found in the antholgoeis The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10 (1984), edited by Arthur W. Saha, and The Best of Shadows (1988), edited by Charles L. Grant. It is included in the collection Faces (1986).