A creepy coming of age novelette from the writer of unflinching fiction with heart: Wade and his best friend Red Collins have only lived eleven summers, but the one they'll remember for the rest of their lives is when Blind Joe Death visited their holler, spinning tales of deadly haints and black dogs that steal souls in the night. Wade lost his father in the mines, and Red wishes his were dead. When the boys invite this strange hoodoo man into their lives they learn that the real monsters walk on two feet and sit beside us in church, and there is no darkness colder than what lurks within the human heart.

Thomas Pluck has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He hails from Nutley, New Jersey, home to criminal masterminds Martha Stewart and Richard Blake, but has so far evaded capture. His latest is Life During Wartime, a story collection that made Out of the Gutter say "this man can write." He is the author of Bad Boy Boogie, his first Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller, and Blade of Dishonor, an action adventure which MysteryPeople called "the Raiders of the Lost Ark of pulp paperbacks."

Joyce Carol Oates calls him "a lovely kitty man."