In The Mean Time
by Paul Tremblay
A history teacher begins his unorthodox senior course with clips from an ominous surveillance video, causing a student's home life to deteriorate along with the lessons.
A girl with a second head that changes into different historical and fictional identities tries to find her father while figuring out how to handle Mom and the book club.
A blog documents society's slow, unexplained, but inexorable end, or is it only a collection of pixel-sized paranoia?
A once-awkward teen holes up in a kiddie-themed amusement park after the end of the world, and schemes to take Cinderella's Castle by force.
This collection by Paul G. Tremblay (author of The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland) features fifteen stories of fear and paranoia, stories of apocalypses both societal and personal, and stories of longing and coping.
Reviews - What's Being Said About Paul Tremblay & In The Mean Time
Paul Tremblay's In The Mean Time is a dark, heart-twisting collection of short fiction which defies categorization and requires your complete attention. The children, parents, and teachers who inhabit these stories exist in the ways we all exist-through those old historical longings which are rarely answered. Tremblay offers no solutions, but in the end, somehow, we walk away with a greater understanding of ourselves. Or, at the very least, the kind of selves we are but rarely see.
– Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalesent
Paul Tremblay's stories sneak up on you quietly and then . . . wow! You don't know what hit you, but you like it. And you want more. Powerful, emotional and unforgettable; these are stories that work their way into your brain and into your heart. Highly recommended.
– Ann Vandermeer, Hugo Award-winning editor of Weird Tales
In The Mean Time is a miscellany of voices-witty, wise, weird, assured. These stories push at boundaries, not just within genre; they play alongside the uneasy undercurrents of lives we'd usually call ordinary. Stories to read and read again.
– Helen Oyeyemi, author of The Opposite House and White is for Witching
In The Mean Time is a formidable collection, as disquieting as it is beautiful. They shock and they gleam, these stories, and the moods they provoke linger powerfully in the imagination: the dread of those who see the trouble coming and the strange relief of those upon whom it has already fallen.
– Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead
Rumor has it that the world will end in fire and ice, but then again, if Paul Tremblay is to be believed, it may conclude in preternaturally active plants, amusement parks, sudden brain aneurisms, and silence. In Mean Time, end of the world scenarios brush up against the traumas of more personal apocalypses. The resulting stories are as stressful and quietly traumatic as they are fluidly and lucidly written.
– Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State
The power of these stories is that you think you're reading them, that there's that distance, but really you're living them, experiencing them, and that's how you remember them later. Not as something you read, but an event you lived.
– Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory and The Ones That Almost Got Away
Paul Tremblay is a storyteller of the highest order-edgy, sensitive, and fearless.
– Stewart O'Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster and Songs for the Missing
Paul Tremblay creates images of terror and wonder. Lean, mean, and just a bit on the nasty side, he's a hardnosed prose stylist with a heavyweight punch. Tremblay is a bona fide contender.
– Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence