When Michael Blumlein's debut collection The Brains of Rats (1990) first appeared, it marked the arrival of a major new talent, earning widespread acclaim from mainstream critics as well as genre stalwarts Peter Straub, Harlan Ellison, Pat Cadigan and many others.
In the World Fantasy Award-nominated title story, a geneticist conflicted over his own sexuality, and the nature of male and female gender roles in general, proposes a drastic solution. The politically charged "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" describes in chilling detail a surgeon's evisceration of President Ronald Reagan. In "Bestseller," a struggling novelist unable to sell his books must sell something else unthinkably horrific in order to provide for his family. In these and the nine other startlingly original stories in this collection, Blumlein blurs the boundaries between horror, science fiction and fantasy, creating a strange and nightmarish world not unlike our own, where nothing is what it seems.
