A Guide for Murdered Children

(Paperback)

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"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book."
David Cronenberg

Originally Published under the name Sarah Sparrow, Bruce Wagner's A Guide for Murdered Childrenis terrifying, thoroughly original, and hauntingly written.

Ex-NYPD detective Willow Wylde is fresh out of rehab and finally able to find a job running a Cold Case squad in suburban Detroit. When the two rookie cops assigned to him take an obsessive interest in a decades-old disappearance of a brother and sister, Willow begins to suspect something out of the ordinary is afoot. He uncovers a series of church basement AA-type meetings made up of the slain innocents and a new way of looking at life, death, murderand missed opportunitiesis revealed to him.

A Guide for Murdered Childrenis a genre-busting, mind-bending twist on the fine line between the ordinary . . . and the unfathomable.

Reviews

"In her astonishing thriller, Sarah Sparrow has joined the ranks of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. A warning: there is no safe place to read this book."
David Cronenberg

If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagners work, it is his language that has kept me hooked Marveling at his comic and linguistic gifts, at his sheer storytelling verve his ability to handle large ensembles of characters and keep numerous narrative balls in the air while at the same time shooting flames from his mouth and balancing a naked lady on his nose I nevertheless introduce Wagners work to my writing students with a caution: Dont try this at home. Sigrid Nunez

"Bruce Wagner is Hollywoods master of satire."--Sam Wasson, author ofThe Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."--Salman Rushdie

"[Wagner'sThe Empty Chair] would make a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace." --Dani Shapiro,The New York Time Book Review

"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."--Emma Cline

"To say that [Maps to the Stars] deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair deglamorized the meat-packing industry... the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters." --Francine Prose

"[Dead Starsis] A Rabelaisian masterpiece." --Sam Sacks,The Wall Street Journal

"Bruce Wagner's stories about Hollywood are the best I've read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West." --Terry Southern

"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates." --John Updike

Author Bio

Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous Cellphone Trilogy,Im Losing You(PEN USA finalist), Ill Let You GoandStill Holding),Dead Stars, The Empty Chair,and the PEN/Faulkner-finalistChrysanthemum Palace.He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenbergs filmMaps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. In 1993, Wagner wrote and created the visionary mini-seriesWild Palmsfor producer Oliver Stone and co-wrote (with Ullman) three seasons the acclaimedTracey UllmansState of the Union.He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.