Onion Songs is a collection of 42 short stories spanning the writing career of Steve Rasnic Tem, with an emphasis on the bizarre, the off-beat and the meditative. Here Tem confronts the big questions of human experience (ageing, death, identity, relationships) like a collector digging deep in the clutter of an attic and pulling out only the most unexpected and most telling finds. His style tersely poetic, Tem is able to give fine reproductions of the texture of everyday life while writing with all the invention of unrestrained nightmare. The mindscapes contained here, where circus clowns cling to meaningless office jobs, skeletons fall like snow, ‘true unicorns’ rummage in garbage piles, and fires are liable to break out at any moment, first engage us deeply where things ache most, then compel us to keep reading with a beauty that, for all its strangeness, we finally recognise as human. Contents 1 Onion Song 2 The Sadness 3 The Messenger 4 The Hijacker 5 Out Late In the Park 6 Picnic 7 Doodles 8 Strands 9 Night: the Endless Snowfall 10 Archetype 11 The Hunter Home from the Hill 12 Shoplifter 13 Brain of Shadows 14 Attached 15 The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital 16 Jungle J.D. 17 Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures 18 How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark 19 Minimalist Biography 20 Sometimes I Get Lost 21 The Changing Room 22 Charles 23 The Figure in Motion 24 The Glare and the Glow 25 Slapstick 26 Strangeness 27 Off the Map 28 Unknown 29 Saturday Afternoon 30 A Visit Home 31 The Multiples of Sorrow 32 Fish 33 Merry-Go-Round 34 The Green Dog 35 A Dream of the Dead 36 Saturday 37 Aphastic World Syndrome 38 December 39 The Mask Child 40 Shuffle 41 12 Minutes of Darkness 42 An Ending