Comparative Anatomy: The Best of Stephen Gallagher

“Magic always stops at midnight,” says the doomed narrator in the title story of Stephen Gallagher’s collection, Comparative Anatomy. The collection features thirty tales.

From the postwar melancholy of a forlorn ghost bound to the house in which it died in “Twisted Hazel,” and a common man’s misguided attempt to temper grief in “Shepherds’ Business,” to the unsettling demands of an overbearing family desperate to reap the rewards of vicarious fame in “Little Dead Girl Singing” and the collision of disparate personalities among wicked children and bizarre religion in “The Butterfly Garden,” Comparative Anatomy is a meditation on what it means to be alive as it is an exploration into what may await us when we die.

The stories explore the nature of ghosts and how often it is us, and not those we’ve lost, who do the haunting, as the lines blur between the paranormal and the pathological. Characters from time travelers to clairvoyants, priests to serial killers, and thieves to ventriloquists find their souls laid bare by spectral encounters and the desires of the human psyche to know what comes next.

Comparative Anatomy includes two original tales, a novelette, “The Backtrack,” and a short story, “Live from the Morgue,” written especially for the collection.