Recipient of the O. Henry and Pushcart prizes for his short stories, Bradford Morrow gathers here for the first time a collection of his most gothic, darkly comic tales, The Uninnocent. 

 

A young man whose childhood hobby of collecting sea shells and birds' nests takes a sinister turn when he becomes obsessed with his brother's girlfriend, in "The Hoarder" (selected as one of the Best American Noir Stories of the Century). An archeologist summoned to attend his beloved sister's funeral is astonished to discover it is not she who has died, but someone much closer to him, in "Gardener of Heart." A blind motivational speaker has a crisis of faith when he suddenly regains his sight, only to discover life was better lived in the dark, in "Amazing Grace." 

 

As Joyce Carol Oates has written, "There has never been a short story by Bradford Morrow that I haven't read at a single sitting—fascinated, thrilled, at times a bit breathless. There is a subterranean air about his fiction that pulls the reader down, as if into a vertiginous whirlpool. If you read just a single story by Bradford Morrow, you will be drawn inexorably into his gravitational pull."