Bone Soup.

Wright, T. M. (author).

After a prolific career of churning out 30 novels and countless cover illustrations, Wright finally mingles fiction, poetry, and artwork in many media in a single volume. The resultant assemblage attests nothing if not versatility as Wright demonstrates a knack for peering around dark corners and exposing unsettling truths hidden in commonplace circumstances. His stories are often preoccupied with the tenuous boundaries between life and death, youth and old age. In "The Lightwater Hawkins Story," an aging recluse wanders ghostlike through a capacious house, confusing memories and dreams with relatives both living and dead. In "His Mother's Eyes," a harried housewife searching for her missing son recovers her own lost childhood in a playground funhouse. Wright's startlingly vivid poems are simultaneously revelatory and disconcerting, while his oil paintings reveal a mastery equally adept at depicting his granddaughter's innocent face and the surreal image of a barren tree overlain by an eyeless mask. The resulting collection showcases a talent that Wright's more illustrious colleague, Stephen King, has called "rare and blazing."