Lost and Lonely

This collection by Brian James Freeman features characters haunted by horrors they think are out of their control, but perhaps the sources of their greatest terrors are closer to home than they ever feared possible.

• “Ice Cold Dan the Ice Cream Man” is the tale of one man doing hard, mind-numbing work to escape the demons of his past, but what if those demons don’t want to let him go without a fight?

• In “Losing Everything Defines You,” a bestselling author believes his family has mysteriously vanished without a trace, yet if that’s true, why is he hearing footsteps in the hallway outside his bedroom door every night?

• When Sam discovers the jogger dying in the middle of the road in “As She Lay There Dying,” he isn’t ready for what she needs to tell him… or more importantly, why she sounds just like his dead wife.

• William Carver and his family fled the colonies to escape a monster stalking their community, but the western plains might not be the safe haven they had hoped for once they hear “How the Wind Lies.”

• When Melissa was a little girl, her father told her children are “Perfect Little Snowflakes,” different and unique in conception because no one knows where they’ll actually land once they hit the ground, but what does that really mean?

• This loving mother doesn’t remember when the coldness began to fester inside her, and now she’s terrified for her baby as she suffers from the final stages of “The Plague of Sadness.”

• And finally, in “The Last Beautiful Day,” a devoted husband returns to the scene of the worst day of his life by volunteering for a job that is both morbid and profound.

These thought-provoking stories show why Stewart O’Nan said Freeman’s writing has “great velocity and impact” and why Publishers Weekly called his work “highly readable.”