"Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display: In "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments,...

Irishman Doug Monahan runs a fencing crew outside the south Texas town of Twin Wells, digging post-holes and stringing red painted barbed wire for ranchers as protection against wandering stock, rustlers, and land hungry thugs. Monahan's fencing operation is opposed by Captain Andrew Rinehart, a former Confederate officer and an old-school open range baron of the huge R Cross spread. With his brutal foreman, Archer Spann, assigned to the violent...

When vigilantes hang a cowboy for stealing horses, Herschel Baker, sheriff of Yellowstone County, Montana, refuses to look the other way. Someone's going to pay--even if all he has to go on is a dead body, a misspelled note, and a wounded horse

A schizophrenic, map-obsessed, shut-in who tours the world using a computer program witnesses what he believes to be a murder in downtown New York City and enlists his caretaker brother in an effort to investigate.

A hired assassin searching for a rival killer, a burned-out detective with a terminally ill wife, and an abandoned youth surviving by his wits follow inextricably linked paths toward community acceptance in the unforgiving sunlight and sprawl of Phoenix.

The fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize. In this stunning collection-a National Book Award finalist-Campbell's rural Michigan characters are both as jagged as rusty metal and as delicate as the light brush of fading dreams.