Praise for American Morons:

"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