In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship in her past. Taking a job with disturbed children, her own mental stability becomes more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between madness and memory, fantasy and abuse, questions elaborated on in No Time Flat.

No Time Flat follows Wade, a young boy who grows up on the American plains in an isolated existence with his elderly parents, as he makes his way through a childhood of playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Becoming a wanderer himself, Wade inhabits a sparse American landscape of fleeting connections, missing children, and possible crimes.

Read an excerpt from Some Phantom/No Time Flat.

Author Photo by Greg Wharton

Stephen Beachy is the author of two novels, The Whistling Song and Distortion. His fiction has appeared in Best Gay American Fiction, BOMB, The Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly and elsewhere, and his nonfiction and critical essays have appeared in such places as New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Raised by Mennonites "somewhere in the Midwest," he now lives in California, where he teaches at the University of San Francisco.

Visit the Stephen Beachy website.