<DIV>Though he has authored more than eleven novels including, <I>Cassandra Singing, The Suicide’s<BR> Wife, Abducted by Circumstance</I>, and the recent <I>London Bridge in Plague and Fire</I>, David<BR> Madden has been publishing short stories for all six decades of his active career. <I>The Last<BR> Bizarre Tale</I> consists of works that appeared in journals but that have not appeared together<BR> as a collection.<BR><br> Madden used two stories, ?The Singer” and ?Second Look Presents: the Rape of an<BR> Indian Brave,” as chapters in his 1980 novel <I>On the Big Wind</I>. ?The Headless Girl’s Mother”<BR> was first published as a chapter in a serialized novel entitled <I>Hair of the Dog</I>. Two other stories<BR> developed out of longer versions of Madden’s novels. ?A Demon in My View” is part of<BR> a sequel, not yet published, to <I>Bijou</I>.<BR><br> All of the stories in David Madden’s third collection are distinguished by variety of content<BR> and by shifting styles and often innovative techniques. They are to varying degrees and<BR> in various ways bizarre in their characters and their relationships, in the kinds of internal<BR> and external conflicts, and in locales and themes. The title story, <I>The Last Bizarre Tale</I>, involving<BR> a corpse that has hung on a hook in a funeral home garage for decades, is evocative<BR> of Poe and, in its dark, grotesque humor, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.<BR> ?Process is as important as product to David Madden,” writes editor James Perkins,<BR> ?and one can learn as much about the process of writing as about the human condition by a<BR> careful reading of these stories.”<BR></DIV>