A Spider on My Tongue

Manhattan Ghost Story #3

by T.M. Wright

It is said that if ghosts were real, they'd be everywhere - at shopping malls, parking lots, in the parlor, the bathroom, on the sidewalks and boulevards (after all, how many people have lived and died throughout human history?). But maybe, just maybe, they are everywhere - on your lap at this very moment, in the walk-in closet, in the grand oak tree just outside your window, in the shower, the cellar-mumbling, grinning, stumbling about, screaming - but only a chosen few of the living have been blessed with the awful gift of being able to see them, hear them, interact with them, tormented by them. That's the awful gift that Abner W. Cray opened two decades ago, and it's a gift that, even today, keeps on giving: it possesses him, seduces him, makes his life (if it can be called a life) much, much more than a nightmare because, he knows, he's not asleep - he is mortally and eternally awake. And that is the spider on his tongue.

Genres: Horror

124 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

Terrance Michael Wright (AKA T. M. Wright) is best known as a writer of horror fiction, speculative fiction, and poetry. He has written over 25 novels, novellas, and short stories over the last 40 years. His first novel, 1978's Strange Seed, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and his 2003 novel Cold House was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. His novels have been translated into many different languages around the world. His works have been reviewed by Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and many genre magazines.

Reviews

[William M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novels by T. M. Wright are always a pleasure to read. He has a unique way of lulling the reader slowly into his grasp and then traps you in his madness where there's no turning back. This latest book is a bit more abstract than some of his other novels, but it remains fascinating nonetheless. No one I've ever read could blur the line between life and death so effectively.

I'm not sure how this ties into his earlier work, "A Manhattan Ghost Story", which is quoted many times throughout this book, but I felt as if I should have read that book first in order to absorb everything that Wright was trying to say. I do own a copy of "A Manhattan Ghost Story", but haven't had a chance to read it yet - I read dozens of horror authors and with all the new titles coming out, it's hard enough to keep up with them much less go back to read their old work - but I will some day.

T. M. Wright always challenges the reader in ways most authors today forget to do. I always finish his books with a dreamy, head-spinning, reflective feeling that I've grown somehow as a person from his words and messages. As if I've been included in some cosmic secret that only a select few are privileged to discover. Along with Gary A. Braunbeck and Tom Piccirilli, T. M. Wright is among the very best of the sophisticated horror authors writing today.

[Neil Davies · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I loved A Manhattan Ghost Story and The Waiting Room, but this novella, the third book in the trilogy, is more of a stream of consciousness text by the character that links all three books than an actual story. It's interesting at first, but even the short length of a novella is too long, and it gets boring. I found myself skipping parts. T.M. Wright is an amazing writer and has written some of the best "quiet" horror I've ever read, but everyone has a bad one now and then. This is his. Pity.

[Debra]

Stephen King recommended author: "T.M. Wright is a rare and blazing talent!"