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On Animal Planet, animals possess the ability to talk as well as any human. They rebel against their human keepers, breaking out of zoos and leaving homes to live as independent beings. For most animals, however, freedom means working a steady job (usually for human bosses) and enjoying the comforts and complacencies of human life. Into this mix flies Charlie the Crow, rabble-rouser and avian revolutionary, whose mission it is to wean animals from the bottle of contemporary culture. But the animals find that freedom depends on who's defining it, and Charlie becomes a media celebrity - appearing on talk shows to promote books, movies, and other endorsement opportunities.

As the revolution is co-opted by savvy profiteers, like the marketing maven Bunny Fairchild, Charlie goes underground, traveling with his reluctant pal Buster the Penguin (who longs for his domestic life back in Antarctica), pursued by an assortment of animal activists, CIA and military operatives, reporters, movie moguls, publishers, and others. Everyone wants a piece of Charlie's radical action...even if they have to kill him to get it.

This is a collection of Scott Bradfield's Dazzle stories, originally published in literary magazines and Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1988 and 2011. Dazzle is a wise-cracking talking dog who feels little if any affinity for the human race.

Contents:

• Dazzle
• Dazzle Redux
• Dazzle's Inferno
• Dazzle Gets Political
• Dazzle the Pundit
• Dazzle Joins the Screenwriter's Guild
• Dazzle Speaks with the Dead
• Starship Dazzle

In these provocative, inventive fictions, we encounter a man who dreams of himself as an Arctic wolf, a creature that slowly makes its way into the waking world; a hostile housewife who cultivates out-of-body experiences and imagines how her existence might serve as the basis for a movie starring Jessica Lange; and an autistic child for whom the world and words are the same thing, equally solid and equally malleable. Bradfield's stories are psychologically compelling and hilarious, particularly when he mixes the supernatural with the mundane. Each one of these twenty-one stories demonstrates his singularly rich language and imagination.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - The Dream of the Wolf
• 25 - The Darling
• 43 - Sweet Ladies, Good Night, Good Night
• 53 - The Wind Box
• 71 - Closer to You
• 80 - The Last Man That Time
• 90 - Didn't She Know
• 102 - In the Time of the Great Dying
• 108 - Ghost Guessed
• 120 - Dazzle
• 133 - White Lamp
• 145 - Hey Hey Hey
• 175 - The Other Man
• 184 - The Promise
• 197 - The Flash! Kid
• 209 - The Monster
• 220 - Greetings from Earth
• 232 - Unmistakably the Finest
• 252 - Diary of a Forgotten Transcendentalist
• 264 - The Secret Life of Houses
• 284 - The Parakeet and the Cat

Phillip is eight years old. He experiences material reality as a hindrance, so he tries to stay in an inner realm composed only of abstract concepts like gravity, motion, sound and light. He lives with Mom, who stays alone in her bedroom. Once he killed a man with gleaming tools from a hardware store. He has a friend with whom he does burglary and drugs and seances. Then Dad comes to stay, and Phillip descends to a subterranean otherworld where he makes contact with "dead black things, obloid and featureless, like faintly disembodied laundry hampers." A sad, beautiful book.