Books by Marshall Moore

A lonely demon in a remote corner of Hell oversees a divine but rigged type contest. A sentient house in San Francisco decides to become vacant once again... by any means necessary. A supernatural first date in Hong Kong goes hysterically, horribly awry. How did this become my life? And... now what? These questions recur throughout The Infernal Republic as a cast of characters you'd either love or run from confront the unlikely and surmount the impossible. The Infernal Republic is the new collection of short fiction from Marshall Moore, the author of The Concrete Sky, Black Shapes in a Darkened Room, and An Ideal for Living. Comprising stories published between 2003 and 2009, as well as several unique to this book, The Infernal Republic is Moore at his best: surreal, hilarious, wise, brutal, and sometimes just plain wrong.

Seth Harrington can be invisible or undetectable, but he is not a superhero. The ability only works in morally grey situations; the rest of the time, he can't turn it on and off at will. He can use a movie ticket stub to buy a coffee or a one-dollar bill to pay for a cell phone. He can stop muggings in plain sight, unseen, but only with worse violence. But this only adds to his confusion about his place in the world. Still reeling from the horrors of the September 11 terrorist attacks and ambivalent about his future, Seth is at a crossroads: Can he be one of the good guys by doing bad things, or are his newfound powers part of someone else's malevolent agenda? There are no easy answers or expected outcomes in Marshall Moore's exploration of urban life and the ways that people can disappear.

Marshall Moore's short fiction is propelled by a scathing wit and a dark imagination, and he does not shy away from taking readers down roads that are less traveled and rarely even mapped. In the title story, a con man cons a beguiling con artist... or does he? In "Grape Night," a new arrival in Hong Kong enjoys the pleasures and terrors of a wine-tasting party with visiting gods from the Greek pantheon. In "Underground," the minotaurs who secretly control urban life welcome a new member of their bloodthirsty elite. And in "Cambodia," a country's genocidal past and its cosmopolitan present collide atop a ruined temple. In A Garden Fed by Lightning, as in his two previous short-story collections, Moore spans multiple genres of fiction and subverts them all.