Scream Queen

Scream Queen offers a panoply of stories that explore the extremes and subtleties of life, death, and nearly every state of being in between. The inescapable fact of loss features prominently, but never without Griffin’s insistence on reprieves to be found in love, humor, companionship, mystery and, for the reader, storytelling and language itself.

-Wendy Rawlings

In Scream Queen, Jeremy Griffin’s latest collection of short stories, we find characters fighting their way onto and off of the fringe. Be it a museum docent whose son is doing hard time, a town under siege by an insatiable alligator, or the titular scream queen, grappling with her fading and bizarre fame, Griffin is able to pinpoint their most intricate and exhilarating desires, what defines and motivates them as they navigate their corruptions. Facing their mortalities, his characters feel all their more real, their desperation so genuine, so familiar, so intoxicating.
—Michael Czyzniejewski

A veterinarian with Huntington’s, the mother of a convicted sex offender, a Catholic priest haunted by his sister’s senseless murder: people from all walks of life collide—sometimes literally—in Griffin’s gripping, grief-soaked stories. It’s been a while since I’ve read a collection that digs this deep or offers such empathy for what Frank O’Connor called “the outlawed figures” living on the fringes. The story “Solve” alone is worth the price of admission. At a time when hipster weirdness often masquerades as invention, Griffin shows us what true imagination can do.
—Eric Puchner