Disfigured inside and out, the characters in Punishing Ugly Children are ill-made for anything but the crooked paths they follow. By turns bleak and amusing, these twenty stories are darkly seductive and compelling. A broken skull reshapes a man's entire consciousness. The daughter of a boxer cheers the final rounds at the end of the world. A high school student uses arson to level the skewed results of a physics exam. Even the fleeting grace of one last win eludes a degenerate gambler. Punishing Ugly Children is a powerful debut collection of unforgettable short stories.

Darryl Joel Berger's fiction has been published in more than twenty literary magazines across Canada and the United States. He is a winner of the David Adams Richards Prize and has been a finalist in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. He lives with his wife and daughter in Kingston, Ontario. You can follow his work at www.red-handed.blogspot.com.

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Punishing Ugly Children

by LeahMurray

Like the ghost of your dead lover, the stories in Darryl Joel Berger’s Punishing Ugly Children will come back to seductively haunt you. To read this book is to enter another world. The fascinating strangeness of the landscape draws you in, and the enthrallingly flawed characters make you want to stay.
Two ten-year old boys on bikes find a dead cat and then something far more sinister. A young woman must make the ultimate decision as the world ends. Twin brothers go on their own separate yet equally grim journeys. A troublemaker takes drastic measures to teach his physics teacher a lesson. A dictator looking for love meets a ghastly end. A man with guns for hands loses at love. Another man bleeds to death at his kitchen table. These are just a few of the twisted scenarios that pull your eyes to the page.
Berger combines words like a poet, in new and beautiful ways, which contrasts deliciously with the dark, sometimes darkly humorous, situations these words describe. With uncanny detail, Berger leads you through the maze of his storytelling, surprising you at every turn.
Reading this book is like flying headlong into the Bermuda Triangle; your navigation system goes a little haywire, there is the sense of mystery and the bizarre. Your curiosity for what-lies-beyond takes over. You won’t want to leave.