Praise for Motherless Child:

Despite a conventional wisdom that has ruled the vampire no longer a fit subject for novels of supernatural horror... the past few years have brought a number of works that have demonstrated the figure's continuing power...With Motherless Child, Glen Hirshberg has also demonstrated that, in the hands of a sufficiently talented writer, there is no figure that is past its prime. Always one of his generation's finest stylists, its most able students of character, he has written one of the best books of the year."
  -- John Langan, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"...this book is the front-runner for when I pick my best horror novel of 2012. The vampire novel has survived TWILIGHT and is dead and kicking as ever, and it will remain so as long as there are writers of Hirshberg's caliber to ring new changes on this venerable archetype."
  -- Black Static

"I must admit that I have often wished that we could declare a moratorium on vampire novels. Generally I inelegantly express this sentiment just before another work comes out that proves me wrong. And here I am, doing so once again just as we're blessed with Glen Hirshberg's Motherless Child, a superbly gritty and intense novel that neither knows nor cares about genres, literary or vampire. Hirshberg is the sort of author who brings an authentic voice of the sort of people you might know, caught up in circumstances beyond our imaginations, to the printed page. Natalie and Sophie, single mothers, meet the Whistler - and his mother. It proves to be unfortunate for all concerned, other than the reader who will be gripped with the white-hot fury of Hirshberg's ability to write great prose, great characters, and great sleaze in a novel that makes you feel. He peels away the American dreams of motherhood and rock and roll to their bloody core. He writes as if possessed by a falling angel. And he brings a genre that deserves to die to shuddering, bloody life. He's probably damned by all this, but readers won't give a damn. A great novel about vampires is a great novel. Put a stake through it."
  -- Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

"Motherless Child moves at a crackling pace, mixing road novel with buddy story (and female buddies, at that) and adding a healthy dollop of good old-fashioned horror. From its striking cover art to its somber last page, it's a vampire novel that deserves your attention."
  -- Robert Morrish, Twilight Ridge and Cemetery Dance Magazine

"The novel teases out a challenging portrait of how love drives and undoes us. Mothers shape and save and swallow their children. Throughout, desire for deep connection moves characters to action, yet the tragedy of the vampire is that such desire can only be realized as hunger...It's a bravura performance."
  -- Bookgasm.com

Hirshberg (The Book of Bunk) weaves love, desire, revenge, loyalty, and sacrifice into a blockbuster narrative. Natalie and Sophie, sassy North Carolina moms with young children, encounter the Whistler, who turns them into vampires. Clinging to humanity, Natalie tells her widowed mother, Jess, to flee with both women's kids. The Whistler's infatuation with Natalie, his "Destiny," leads him to track down her child as bait to ensure that she will complete her transformation to immortality as his vampiric companion. Angered by the loss of the Whistler's affection, his companion, Mother, forges her own plots. Hirshberg's adept characterization engages the reader's sympathies for Natalie and Sophie as they fight the pangs of vampiric hunger and yearn for their absent children. His depiction of Jess in her dogged, self-sacrificial adherence to Natalie's request evokes Faulknerian depth. The clash of human and vampire worlds in the tumultuous final showdown presents a satisfying, startling, conclusion and infuses this work with both literary and genre merit.
  -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The back cover copy of Motherless Child reads "Another vampire novel? Really?"...Well, if it's as well-written as this novel, then, YES, another Vampire novel. Hirshberg's story uses Vampirism as the mcguffin that drives  the narrative, which is, at it's core, a heartbreaking exploration of friendship, motherhood, love, loss, and loyalty. The characters of Sophie and Natalie are incredibly well-realized; Their friendship feels real, and is filled with the little quirks and shorthands that you would expect to find in people that have been together for most of their lives. The Whistler and Mother are presented more as forces of nature than villains, lending their actions a kind of otherworldly lack of conscience....They do what they do because, at this point, it's all they know. The thought of a change in their lifestyle is both exciting and terrifying at the same time, and each is willing to do anything to get their way.

Motherless Child is a staggeringly good novel, and if I had any complaint, it's that it ended too soon. Highly recommended.
  -- horrorworld.org

This is not a romantic tale of catlike eyes in the dark, or a feel-the-sin tale of rotting meat scents and tallow skin. There are no fangs, no flying and no bats, but the visual sense Hirshberg develops is astounding. He creates vivid environments where you can feel the sticky heat of a Waffle House on one page and sense the dull taste of overchewed bubble gum on the next. Natalie and Sophie are relatable both individually and in their relationship to each other; it's wonderful to read a moment where a girl removes a neck tendon from her injured friend's mouth, gently admonishing her, "Honey, don't do that," and know exactly how she feels.
  -- Fangoria

"Even if you've sworn to yourself never to read vampire fiction again, do yourself the favor of reading Motherless Child. Glen Hirshberg has crafted a compelling, heartbreaking thriller full of character, grit, and sorrow. Bravo"  -- Christopher Golden

"Like an alchemist loose in a meth lab, Hirshberg produces rocket-fuelled gold in his magnificent Motherless Child; a sui generis mash-up of literary sensibility and B-movie energy, a shotgun wedding of the melancholy and the menacing, the meditative and the monstrous."  -- Peter Atkins

Praise for The Janus Tree:

"With the blue collar fascinations of Stephen King and the gleeful perversity of a young Ray Bradbury, Glen Hirshberg digs deep beneath the commonplace exteriors of modern American lives to find malaise and bad mojo. The Janus Tree and Other Stories is his latest compilation of mundane façades destroyed by buried impulses and desires. And although illness and madness course through these tales, there are quieter, more melancholy moments such as the account in 'Sho-mer' of a young man's bizarre trials during the Jewish ceremony of guarding a corpse. And the two stories concerning a strange urban phenomenon dubbed 'the Book Depositories' have a kind of black Brautigan whimsy."  -- Asimov's Science Fiction

"What is almost immediately clear on reading is that Hirshberg has a knack for creating pitch-perfect atmospheres through careful wording, atmospheres that either repel or beckon-sometimes both...This deceptively slim volume is full of insistent voices, persistent nightmares, and lurching moments that make the ordinary frightening-a fine book for keeping yourself sleepless on quiet winter nights."  -- Strange Horizons

"For those in the know, a new horror collection from Glen Hirshberg is cause for hopeful anticipation. And The Janus Tree and Other Stories delivers with a striking and enjoyable mix of stories that showcases Hirshberg's uniquely personable brand of horror, in which external menaces are eclipsed by the inner demons that drive our deepest fears...The Janus Tree casts a superbly twisted shadow."  -- SF Site Featured Review

"Books and movies seem to feel overwhelming with the amount of in your face gore, monsters, and the odd, so much so that one can feel a bit jaded. Glen Hirshberg's new book, The Janus Tree, can help cure one's boredom and send chills running down the spine once again....Hirshberg is amazing at twisting the mundane into one creepy story."  (Four Stars)  -- City Book Review (San Francisco/Sacramento)

"Spellbinding...offbeat and distressing...atmospheric, superb...Hirshberg is one of the greatest contemporary authors of dark fantasy."  -- SFRevu.com

"Hirshberg delivers plenty of creepy, strange tales in his third collection...{He} is a master of the disturbing."  --Publishers' Weekly

Reviews of The Book of Bunk:

"This brilliant and moving novel about family, betrayal, imagination, love and identity establishes Glen Hirshberg among our most profound and necessary writers - a novelist of the old school, a master."   -- Peter Straub

"The Book of Bunk is a ribald, tender, generous and mesmerizing river of American storytelling. You can swim in the smart, lush detail of the 1930's, and the streams of vivid people in crises both tragic and picaresque. But the dueling Dent brothers are so passionate and dimensional that their hurtling momentum sweeps you away. The Book of Bunk is an amazing ride and a wonderful read."   -- Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love

"In this lyrical meditation on the sustaining power of the imagination, an officer of the WPA's Federal Writers' Project taps Okie hobo Paul Dent to contribute to the guide series documenting the American way of life in each of the 48 states. Off-loaded to Trampleton, N.C., in March 1936, Paul immerses himself in the local culture and becomes privy to fascinating oral anecdotes of the town's social and racial history. He also takes part in the Buncombe ("Bunk") County masquerade, a townwide indulgence in make-believe sponsored by a thinly disguised F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose skill at mythmaking clearly inspired Hirshberg (American Morons). Tragedy intervenes at the instigation of Paul's older brother, Lewis, a political opportunist, but not before this vivid re-creation of smalltown Depression-era America enchants with its well-drawn characters, eloquent repartee, and poignant fantasia on a social experiment, which, if it didn't play out this way, should have."   -- Publishers' Weekly

"With an eye for period detail and a knack for creating mesmerizing characters, Hirshberg gives us a peek at a special time, in a special place. Grab a copy of the Earthling edition if you can find it, or buy The Book of Bunk once it's been reprinted, as it surely will be if there's any literary justice in the world."   -- Robert Morrish (review forthcoming in Cemetery Dance #66)

Advance praise for The Book of Bunk:

"Glen Hirshberg's The Book Of Bunk is a miracle of narrative diversity and drive:  Stories begetting stories begetting other stories yet that, after several hundred pages, confabulate a lyrical history.  It's as if Woody Guthrie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had co-authored a 90000 word folk song about an obscure WPA project."
  -- Lucius Shepherd

"In The Book of Bunk, Glen Hirshberg takes us on a journey through Depression-era, small town America that is, in turns, whimsical and tragic, romantic and true. Hirshberg has an eye for the details of the 1930s that will put readers in mind of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, while the riveting sibling rivalry that plays out between the brothers Dent is nothing short of biblical. Bunk County is a place where many of us already live, if only we could admit it."
  -- Sharon Pomerantz, author of Rich Boy

 "The Book of Bunk is anything but, by turns powerful, sad, ecstatic, and, above all, a clear sign that the uniquely American novel is alive and well. I loved it."
  -- Jeff Vandermeer, author of Finch

Praise for American Morons:

"Fear may be the most primal and universal emotion, but as Hirshberg demonstrates in this new story collection, it's also quite personal. The things that frighten Hirshberg's characters-whether they be children mourning their grandfather or 19th-century surveyors-are deeply psychological and rooted in the author's nuanced and oddly gentle portraiture."
  -- Time Out Chicago

"A keeper among this season's offerings is American Morons, a second collection of seven ingenious ghost stories from Glen Hirshberg. Mr. Hirshberg specializes in revealing how the past impinges horrifically upon the present, smashingly in the title story about American tourists stranded on an Italian country road until a chance "rescue" that isn't what it initially seems; and a brisk account of a retiring teacher's day-trip on the shuttle service ("Transitway") that appears to be conveying him to a reunion with his long lost family. Even better are the story of secrets discovered by two young boys who mischievously explore the crowded house owned by their late beloved grandfather ("The Muldoon"); and a superb period piece ("Devil's Smile"), in which a lighthouse inspector encounters a lonely woman whose explanatory tale of death at sea, survival and grief opens an unwanted window on stories perhaps better left untold."
  -- The Washington Times

"A thoughtful collection of skillfully executed short stories that demonstrate his prowess as a writer. This is a collection to be savored, saved and enjoyed."
  -- Monsters and Critics

"American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg."
  -- Dennis Etchison

"Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons."
  -- Aimee Bender

"American Morons, like The Two Sams before it, is an excellent collection in every way. Hirshberg is among the best short story writers in, out of, or around, the genre of the fantastic. His fiction is marked by clarity, depth and a restraint and subtlety that make the horror and the wonder seem absolutely possible."
  -- Jeffrey Ford

"With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it."
  -- Peter Straub

"Hirshberg's American Morons is a finely crafted collection and a perfect example of the power and range of what can be called either literary fiction or horror fiction, depending on where you find it. It draws on the heritage of Shirley Jackson and Poe, or Ramsey Campbell and Herman Melville. It is nothing less than the constantly sorry state of the world we must live in, of the lives we must lead, wrought in beautiful prose with a twisted sense of the imagination."
  -- Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

"His skill at drawing horrors out of commonplace situations peopled with credibly drawn characters distinguishes these subtle tales of the uncanny as some of the most effective and chilling in contemporary weird fiction."
  -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Glen Hirshberg's American Morons is a collection of great ghost stories... The author's strength is in his ability not to shock or even scare, but to create characters who are genuinely haunted and whose stories have an afterlife in their reader's consciousness."
  -- J.T. Hill, bookslut.com
     read the complete review

"His characters hold the long coil of human life in their hands and examine how the commonplace can spiral into a shimmering half-truth... These...finely wrought tales of suspense reaffirm what Hirshberg teaches in his title story, and which Poe, too, believed: that the most horrifying monsters are those that walk among us."
  -- Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review
     read the complete review

Praise for The Two Sams:

"In THE TWO SAMS the greatly gifted Glen Hirshberg does a magnificent job of redefining and updating the ghost story in his own smart, subtle, insightful way. Here is a writer to watch and to treasure."
  -- Peter Straub

"He is the author of stories that are as unsettling as they are scary, as disturbing as they are profound...Literary, chilling, the next big thing."
  -- Robert Masello in the Los Angeles Times

"Here's a collection of horror stories that should curdle your latte."
  -- Chicago Sun-Times

"Veteran horror writer Ramsey Campbell...makes the case that Hirshberg will prove to be a crucial contributor to the field. Based on these handful of stories, it's not an unreasonable claim...Hirshberg takes an assured, literary approach to the material, and he is uninterested in the bloody shock effects employed by some of his peers. That's not to say, however, that some of these stories aren't very scary. The horrors revealed in THE TWO SAMS are the subtle kind, those that sting harder in the memory than they might in the first reading."
  -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Hirshberg's stories are steeped in melancholy and loss, but none more than the title story, 'The Two Sams.' The unbearable ache of a childless couple becomes a song of bottomless sadness. It's a difficult story, and I'm not sure I caught everything Hirshberg was throwing, but I can't bring myself to read it again. In horror literature, I suppose that's a compliment.

Hirshberg's only novel to date, 'The Snowman's Children,' showed flashes of the greatness that is predicted for him. This collection shows the same. He is original and has real talent, and I truly fear that one of these days he's going to put it all together."
  -- San Jose Mercury News

"I can't tell you much about Glen Hirshberg, despite his 'multiple World Fantasy Awards and International Horror Guild nominations'. I can tell you that from what I've read of this collection of five novellas about terror and its wellsprings within us all, that he appears to be every bit as good as the numerous glowing quotes on the jacket promise. That he weaves a spell out of mood and place and creates an atmosphere of tremendous tension, then when you're almost ready to let out a long sigh…he springs and turns the tables and lets out the terror. He's good, he is. Very, very good."
  -- SFRevu.com

"Hirshberg’s storytelling recalls the likes of Peter Straub, and his ability to entwine reality with abnormality allows the collection to succeed in a powerful way. It shows that our ghosts are internal—that they manifest themselves in our emotions and experiences—and they are inescapable unless we face them."
  -- Necroscopy: The Review of Horror Fiction

"'We go where our ghosts lead us.' So says the narrator of a story in Hirshberg's luminous new collection of weird tales in which ghosts assume the shape of unaddressed emotional needs and denied fears, and the avenues characters follow them down end in haunting self-discovery...Hirshberg shows uncommon talent for insinuating the supernatural into scenarios grounded in credible reality and for maintaining ambiguity until the moment of prime emotional impact...Struck from the mode of classic ghost fiction and filled with emotionally charged set pieces, these exceptional and accomplished stories will put readers in mind of the electrifying short fiction of Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, and other writers who represent the best of modern literary weird fiction. A laudatory introduction by Ramsey Campbell and a blurb by Stephen Jones will help alert readers to this rising star."   -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A professor discovers the horrible truth behind a local legend in "Mr. Dark's Carnival," one of five novella-length tales that showcase Hirshberg's (The Snowman's Children) subtle talent for creating horror out of the ordinary lives of everyday people. From the poignant sadness of the title story to the stark inevitability of a young man's journey into darkness ("Struwwelpeter"), the stories in this volume exhibit a keen understanding of the elements of terror. Literate, thoughtful, and affecting, this collection, which includes an introduction by horror master Ramsey Campbell, belongs in most libraries' short story or horror collections."
  -- Library Journal

"A collection of five stories from an original, haunting, literate voice. His impressive first novel, The Snowman's Children was a highlight of 2002. Hirshberg has a knack for the truly unsettling tale, the kind that draws us closer and closer to the picture where we discover the image before us is really a mirror. This is certainly one of the most remarkable debut collections in memory."
  -- Cemetery Dance

"Hirshberg’s prose is clear, cadenced, and wonderfully evocative, and never strikes a false or imprecise note. He has the true novelist’s feeling for character and place, and his stories combine the mundane and the extraordinary in fresh, unpredictable ways. The result is a resonant, moving collection by a genuinely exciting new voice. On the evidence of his first two books, Glen Hirshberg seems able to do almost anything. It will be interesting -- and instructive -- to see where he goes from here."
  -- Locus

"I am a great reader of short fiction, and I feel that Glen Hirshberg's ghost stories are among the finest tales published over the past decade."
  -- Jack Cady, author of The American Writer

"With The Two Sams, Glen Hirshberg joins the ranks of the very best supernatural writers -- Robert Aickman, Robertson Davies, Jocye Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell -- people whose work acts as a dark mirror in which the shadowy figures that so terrify us are reflections of our children, parents, lovers, teachers -- and most frightening of all, ourselves. The Two Sams is superb."
  -- Elizabeth Hand, author of Waking The Moon

"The Two Sams is indeed a book to treasure: a collection of haunting and satisfying stories wrapped in the elegant prose of a master craftsman."
  -- Sharyn McCrumb, New York Times best-selling author of Ghost Riders

"Glen Hirshberg is the next Big Thing in horror fiction--these beautifully crafted stories pack an emotional jolt that will leave the reader literally breathless with fear."
  -- Stephen Jones, editor of Best New Horror

Reviews and Comments on The Snowman's Children:

"A brilliantly-rendered portrait of the bond between endangered children, this compelling and evocative novel tells the truth, beautifully."
  -- Andrew Vachss
     see "Righteous Reading" at www.vachss.com

"This technically perfect, beautifully rendered childhood is what makes The Snowman's Children so powerful. Mattie's parents . . . are perfectly believable, and his popular younger brother could step off the page and right into our living rooms. This is 'normal' American suburban life seen without cliches, a series of houses on a series of streets, where a series of parents try--or don't try--to make life safe for their kids."
  - Carolyn See, The Washington Post
     read the complete review

"Not since 'Stand by Me' has there been such a moving and penetrating portrait of the importance--and dangers--of friendships. [The Snowman's Children] will not only grip your heart, but melt it as well."
  - The Literary Guild (New & Noteworthy selection)

"Hirshberg deftly uses hints of magic realism to depict the wintry landscape of Mattie's remembered childhood. Everything from children's names. . . to the games they play. . . lends the book a sinister air of unreality. . . The novel may remind readers of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, another eerie, nostalgic coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s Detroit suburbs."
  - Publishers Weekly

"Hirshberg holds the reader's interest from the first page to the last. He's as comfortable with loose ends as he is with life's realities. . . [The Snowman's Children] holds the tension of a thriller combined with an insight into character more often found in literary than in genre fiction."
  - Robin Vidimos, Denver Post
     read the complete review

"With this remarkable debut, Glen Hirshberg pinpoints that single fixed moment of youth in which lies the DNA of a life, and how finally we're all the ghosts of our own childhood."
  - Steve Erickson, author of The Sea Comes in at Midnight

"This promising debut novel is weirdly tender. Even as a serial killer stalks his characters, Glen Hirshberg remembers that in-between age and his long-lost city with great depth and affection."
  - Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for The Dying

"The Snowman's Children ends with nothing and nobody unshattered, least of all the reader. Its world spins with a sad inexorability that is at once achingly familiar and disturbingly alien. The book is wise, intelligent, thick with arresting imagery, and infused with an accelerating gush of dread."
  - Bryan Di Salvatore, author of A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward

"Glen Hirshberg, already an expert teller of ghost stories, has written a dark, haunting first novel that is a poignant and disquieting coming of age story."
  - Ellen Datlow, Co-editor of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror

"Glen Hirshberg has written a dense, intricate, and eerily beautiful novel about the perils of childhood, families, friendships, and real monsters. You fall under the spell of this book, as if falling backwards into a bank of soft, deep snow."
  - Kelly Link, author of Stranger Things Happen

"A chilling debut...Haunting and sharply rendered..."
  - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"First novelist Hirshberg ... has a real gift for capturing the emotional power of childhood friendships."
  - Booklist