"Clegg (The Machinery of Night) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories....riveting reading." -- Publishers Weekly. From award-winning author Douglas Clegg comes a special quartet of stories dealing with creatures of the wild- wolf, bird, and the most terrifying of beasts: the human variety. Contents

• In "The Wolf" a hunter guides a younger man up a mountain to track down the creature that has been slaughtering in the valley below.
• "The American" takes place at a late-night cafe in Rome where foreigners gather. On this particular night a stranger steps out of the shadowy park to sit at the sidewalk tables and speak of love and murder.
• In "A Madness of Starlings," a father, teaching his children about protection from the predators of life, takes in a fledgling bird. But when it's time for the bird to fly away, the forces of nature come undone and a secret wisdom and terror enter the mind of the one who understands the language of birds.
• , In the novella, "The Dark Game," a war hero and his men are captured and taken into a prison camp. There, tortures and torments await them, but the man named Gordon Raglan begins to use a childhood game of escape to help him discover a way to hunt the wolves surrounding him.