From Publishers Weekly
Offbeat plots and characterizations strengthen a collection of 11 tales featuring the usual bunch of loners, sociopaths and psychotics who have spread hints of menace and violence through countless modern short stories. Spencer ( Maybe I'll Call Anna ) adroitly mixes humor with the macabre to intensify the horror in pieces like the title story, which chronicles the re-emergence of the narrator's psychotic alter-ego, who electrocutes his victims. Black humor also comes into play in "The Wedding Photographer in Crisis," whose protagonist forces the groom to go through with the ceremony at gunpoint, and in "Haunted by the Horror King," which shows a writer driven to madness by the success of Stephen King. Spencer likes to give a nod to other writers: "Snow" is a modern version of Somerset Maugham's "Rain;" the eerie "A Child's Christmas in Florida" is like nothing Dylan Thomas would have imagined. "Looking Out for Eleanor," the collection's best story, takes a noirish journey through Texas and Florida as two narrators strive to protect the childish, amoral title character. In style and content, these tales hark back to such recently rediscovered '50s existentialist classics as Charles Willeford's Miami Blues . Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A first collection of 11 short stories, many with a Rod Serling-like twist, together with an introduction by Spencer (Maybe I'll Call Anna, 199) that laments the present-tense minimalist state of the literary short story. ``The Return of Count Electric'' is about a narrator who searches in his father's house for a death machine, thinking his father is a serial murderer; instead, he discovers that he himself is the murderer and, once he remembers, begins again his career of crime. ``The Wedding Photographer in Crisis'' concerns a Bill Murray kind of guy who forces a groom to go through with the wedding and films the bride topless. Spencer's antic side is more effective than his Twilight Zone stories: ``The Entomologists at Obala,'' for example, is a biting satire about two naturalists battling it out in a South American rain forest over whose endangered species is the more important--one shoots wasps, and the other takes spiders hostage. ``Looking Out For Eleanor,'' at near novella-length, uses multiple voices and a complex social tapestry to tell the blackly humorous saga of a social worker obsessed with rescuing an attractive client by following her and her seedy boyfriends to Florida. Stories that mostly manage to be otherworldly and strange without turning into horror fiction or mere trots. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the title story--which tells of a letter from the past that sends a middle-aged man in search of a diabolical engine of death and the identity of a legendary murderer--and other stories, William Browning Spencer demonstrates a wildly imaginative, non-stop narrative skill in the tradition of Roald Dahl and John Collier.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Offbeat plots and characterizations strengthen a collection of 11 tales featuring the usual bunch of loners, sociopaths and psychotics who have spread hints of menace and violence through countless modern short stories. Spencer ( Maybe I'll Call Anna ) adroitly mixes humor with the macabre to intensify the horror in pieces like the title story, which chronicles the re-emergence of the narrator's psychotic alter-ego, who electrocutes his victims. Black humor also comes into play in ``The Wedding Photographer in Crisis,'' whose protagonist forces the groom to go through with the ceremony at gunpoint, and in ``Haunted by the Horror King,'' which shows a writer driven to madness by the success of Stephen King. Spencer likes to give a nod to other writers: ``Snow'' is a modern version of Somerset Maugham's ``Rain;'' the eerie ``A Child's Christmas in Florida'' is like nothing Dylan Thomas would have imagined. ``Looking Out for Eleanor,'' the collection's best story, takes a noirish journey through Texas and Florida as two narrators strive to protect the childish, amoral title character. In style and content, these tales hark back to such recently rediscovered '50s existentialist classics as Charles Willeford's Miami Blues . (Sept.)

BookList - Eloise Kinney