Rules of Appropriate Conduct

by Kirsten Alene

"Alene makes you feel the wistfulness, the longing, the heart-skipping magic of encountering your true love... as skillfully - MORE skillfully than many writers who work with strictly human characters." - Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown and Deadstock

220 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2015

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this. I really did. The stories are so weird, so different. But I couldn't get into them. I read them all, sort of. By the end I was kind of on autopilot and I don't think I was even reading all the words. It started to feel like the book was trying to hard to be far out.

[Matt Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirsten Alene has the unique talent to ascribe truly human emotions to all things bizarre and unsettling. The worlds she creates are beyond genre limitations, stretching to the imagination where reality becomes impossible, yet perfectly logical. With an ammunition of dinosaurs, manatees, and other weirdness, her prose is beautiful and lush, calling to mind the existential dread of Brian Evenson, the paradoxical & twisted normality of Kelly Link, and the kind of mutated hope that all bizarro authors should aspire to. Trust me, you'll wish you'd read this sooner.