Robin McLean's award-winning debut short story collection Reptile House is inhabited by killers and thieves, astronauts, moose hunters and country club ladies, all seeking some way out, some new door to imagined happiness. The characters in these nine stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, derail their lives with desires and delusions, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? McLean's stories probe the underbelly of human behavior, revealing the darker motivations behind the chilling interactions she breathes to life. The stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty all around us.
Robin McLean was a lawyer then a potter for 15 years in the woods of Alaska before receiving her MFA at UMass Amherst. Her debut story collection Reptile House won the BOA Editions Fiction Prize in 2013. She teaches at Clark University and splits her time between Newfound Lake in New Hampshire and a 200-year-old farm in western Massachusetts.