In his second short story collection, Sheldon Lee Compton explores strange and broken worlds in short spaces that carry a wealth of insight and entertainment. A prison inmate files suit against Hugh Jackman doing business as Wolverwine, Billy the Kid poses for his now famous photograph and allows a peak inside the mind of a killer, and a bare knuckle boxer defends his family name in defending his title of King of the Travellers.. Compton is at his best in these stories - piquant, compelling, and profound. The collection's dozens of stories bring readers fraught, masterfully crafted tales, seasoned with the good news of destiny, redemption, and catharsis. “Yes, yes, yes, here’s a book that restores my faith that literary fiction can be more than just the repurposing of long exhausted themes, more than another trope for a previously disenfranchised group, and more than a game of sentence-making mumblety-peg played by a narrow swath of writers. You could pick up hundreds of books and not find anything that resembles the way these words are assembled. Too much of literary fiction is simply a different story told with the same style of language. Sometimes it seems only the names of the characters have changed. Not so with Where Alligators Sleep.” – Steven J. McDermott, author of Winter of Different Directions and Editor of Storyglossia “I thought I knew flash fiction. I felt pretty comfortable with its range and scope, its genre boundaries and limitations. And then I read Sheldon Lee Compton’s Where Alligators Sleep. And everything I thought I knew and loved about flash fiction went sailing out the front door, hit the curb and was run over by a pickup truck. This is the sort of collection that reaches deep into your chest, grabs hold of your heart and twists. It is raw, visceral, daring, risky and, at the end of the day, rock-solid writing. I have never so whole-heartedly recommended a collection of flash fiction.” – Steph Post, author of A Tree Born Crooked