Stay Awake

National Book Award finalist Chaon follows up his critically acclaimed novel Await Your Reply with this disquieting collection of 12 stories. His characters are everyday people experiencing extreme emotional situations that pull them into a strange, shadowy otherworld. In "The Bees," five-year-old Frankie suffers from nightmares, while father Zach has dreams that feel like bees buzzing in his head about an ex-wife and son he deserted years ago. In "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted," Brandon Fowler lives alone in a family house where his parents killed themselves; one night, he senses the house creeping in on him. In "Slowly We Open Our Eyes," brothers Smokey and Donnie O'Sullivan are traveling cross-country to their grandmother's funeral when they swerve to miss a deer and have an accident that changes everything. In the title story, Zach and Amber's new baby, Rosalie, is born with two heads. Soon after his daughter's birth, Zach is paralyzed in an auto accident and begins obsessing about the parasitic head.