by Peter Straub
First published 2019
A personal assistant discovers hidden truths about her dead employer, a famous playwright, and his connection to a woman running an Italian arts foundation. A novelist reads his Cherokee grandfather's notebook and studies ancestral teachings. A young boy strips naked and crawls into a dark sewer pipe, then vanishes without trace. These stories unfold across thirty-one pieces that examine curiosity's dual nature. Writers take readers from forgotten graveyards to natural history museums, from mysterious lakes to post-apocalyptic coastal settlements. One piece visits an actual curiosity cabinet in Amsterdam, filled with specimens in jars and pinned displays. The collection shows how curiosity drives revelation and destruction equally. It compels scientists and gossips alike. It creates wonder and terror in the same breath. These writers understand that curiosity never stops moving through human lives, shaping decisions both simple and complex, moral and corrupt.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Amsterdam, Italy
Period: 21st-century
450 pages · Kindle Edition · Conjunctions
Content warnings: death