LOST IN THE FOREST OF MECHANICAL BIRDS

Atmospheric short fiction that harnesses the power of the weird.

Moody needs only four short stories and a novella as to win over his audience; these strange, wonderful tales will enchant readers of all stripes, from the literary-minded to the speculative-loving. In “The Go Seekers,” a young hide-and-seek champion vanishes mysteriously from her college campus, leaving her father and two would-be lovers to wonder how and why she disappeared. “Horusville” finds a high school student in the throes of an odd affair with his art teacher, who also happens to be his future sister-in-law. Their rendezvous take place in the midst of a copse of trees with eyes that record everything they see in their bark. The title story follows an impoverished family whose bird-watching husband and father is creating a flock of mechanical birds out of old auto and appliance parts. The eponymous character in “The Babycatcher” takes a childless couple into the woods to capture a wild creature who looks very much like a baby, but whose aberrant behavior quickly becomes more than its adoptive “parents” can handle. Finally, in “Ray of Golden Yolk,” an egg inspector who detects a frightening anomaly in one of his company’s products comes home the same day to find that his wife and teenage daughter are both inexplicably pregnant. With the exception of the opener, each story presents a world very much like our own but for one key detail. (The only thing strange about “The Go Seekers” is the way hide-and-seek takes over one community as an obsessive sport.) The prose is crisp and clean, even spare in places. The sex, while not titillating, is utterly human. And the stories, while few, are uniformly excellent.

A brilliant collection of delightfully surreal tales that linger long after reading.