Slaughtered farm animals, Chupacabras demons, and the adolescent lust for sex: Marilyn Brock's first collection of stories, Beaux Fest for the Wicked, explores our fascination with horror in the context of frightening changes from society and from within. Brock's protagonists teeter on the edge of society and the cusp of adulthood, are forced to grapple with unexplained mysteries not only in their own neighborhoods, but in their own broken families. In "Seattle's Best Neighborhood," a girl and her friends attempt to solve two mysteries in their town- slaughtered cows that keep appearing, and a house of cryptic teenage boys. "Sterling" explores the sense of loss a daughter feels as she watches her father waste away after her mother's and sister's death. Brock has studied her predecessors well: by the last story's close, Beaux Fest will have unsettled the reader as well as any story by Joyce Carol Oates or Edgar Allan Poe. This collection of stories flirt with darkness and light, cold and fire, and the boundaries that are being redefined in literature, art, and film.