From time to time when I take a break from researching and writing my thrillers, I write short stories such as the ones collected for the first time in this new anthology, Trust and Other Nightmares. Each of these stories has its germination in nights when my sleep was suddenly savaged by ethereal visions and sounds sufficiently disturbing to wrench me from tangled, sweat-drenched sheets. Some of them have seen a bit of daylight before now, and the last two debut here. All of them are spawned of the dancing skeletons and reanimated corpses that plague the bleakest, blackest hours preceding my blessed dawns.

They include:

• "Trust", without which a murder-suicide pact is merely revenge's favorite recipe
• "Rougarou", where a terrified boy learns it's never easy to tell monsters from saviors in a desolate Louisiana swamp
• "Frankie's Last Affair", where we're taught that if a thing is truly art, someone has to suffer for it
• "Canis", a post-apocalyptic tale where the wolves in sheep's clothing have no lock on cross-dressing
• "Showtime", in which a famous television psychic medium's dirty secret is he knows there's no such thing as ghosts

I hope you enjoy this collection. If it scares you enough to keep you up a night or two, I know just how you feel. As this anthology demonstrates, I sleep well rarely.