"Gilbert Allen's perfect The Beasts of Belladonna reminds me of Winesburg, Ohio on hallucinogens. It's Our Town in a funhouse mirror. These linked stories, though mostly comedic/satirical, at times turn toward tragedy when least expected. I loved these characters, thrown into situations they didn't deserve. A great portrait of early twenty-first-century America." --George Singleton, author of You Want More: Selected Stories "A surreal (or hyper-real!) narrative of heart, race, class, and circumstance in the old/new South's Dark Corner where inflatable dolls stand in for missing children, local clergy don flame-resistant racing suits to compete in the Faster Pastor Challenge at the Speedway, and all kinds of unlikely human and animal passions reveal themselves in recursive yet ever-surprising configurations of brutality and redemption. What a lively menagerie of beasts and souls!" --Claire Bateman, author of Coronology "Gilbert Allen's Belladonna is a wondrous, weedy place, blossoming with untrimmed joy and sadness. Words buzz like bumblebees around wild bergamot.

Emotions glow like goldenrod. People cavort in howling monkey flower antics while virgin's bower is bright with stars although virgins themselves are an endangered species in Belladonna. Like summer nights with their katydids and cicadas, Belladonna is euphoric with the sounds of dogs, cats, birds, children, and foolish good living." --Samuel Pickering, Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut "In this exciting new collection Gilbert Allen looks at our society from a special angle of wit, relish, and surprise. The stories present a world at once distorted and familiar, of marriage, family, and an interconnected community across the generations, exposing our culture of consumption and the retail sublime as no one else has." --Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek.