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Welcome to a dark country of sadness and wonder. Where a wedding dress turns a reluctant bride into a flock of birds, and families put on their wolf coats before devouring one another. These growling, prickly-feathered stories blur the lines between human and animal, living and dead. Teenage spirits are condemned to drive around their hometown forever. Five brothers learn that they were once crows. The bank hires a man to go into foreclosed houses and kill their monsters. Two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead. Plumbers kidnap mermaids trapped in a city sewer system. A mockingbird sings a woman’s sins. A boy with a single swan’s wing yearns to fly. And watching over all of them is the queen of the dead, who sends her vulture men to scavenge the bones. The characters in these modern fairy tales challenge expectations and norms in a dark and magical shared world.
Praise for Vulture Gold
“Built upon the bones of fairy tales, legends, and ghost stories, this dark and lush collection offers up a fresh exploration of the human condition through the lens of the fantastic.”
—A.C. Wise, author of Ballad of the Bone Road
“Each of Micah Dean Hicks’s short stories is a thin slice of heart perfectly preserved in prose, so that this collection is like a beautifully arranged charcuterie tray of the human experience. You won’t know whether to savor each beautiful and insightful morsel or to devour them all in a blaze of feeling. Compelling, powerful, unsettling, and gorgeous—this is must-read fiction from a major talent.”
—Wendy N. Wagner, author of Girl in the Creek and The Deer Kings
“These stories, in the deft hand of Micah Dean Hicks, combine the grit of rural living with the soaring speculation of the fabulous. Writing in the rich vein of greats like Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link, Hicks grants us entrée into complex ruminations on poverty and well-being, queerness, gender, and all of the bloody, beating moments that shape the human heart.”
—Joe Baumann, author of Tell Me
Published by University of Nebraska Press.
Cover art by Madison Brake.
Micah Dean Hicks 