Sweater Girl and Other Tales of Mondauk County is a collection of novellas and stories that explores the condition of morbid nostalgia: being so bound to the past that it poisons the present and chokes the future. In the novella "Sweater Girl," a man combs through the ashes of a teenage party that took place forty years ago, looking for clues to what had transpired, including arson, an amputation, and the death of his father, while obsessing on the party's catalyst, an enthralling young sweater girl. Plus...a retired romance novelist faces her fears of intimacy in a most radical fashion...a cult member becomes consumed with an underage girl...a loner signs up for a spelling bee to impress a popular girl on the eve of an assault on the school...as a weary detective hunts the Red Ribbon Killer, a grandmother confronts the secret in her shed...an ex-boxer squares off against a mob capo when his wife disappears...a man finds a radio broadcasting from his past in the abandoned Divine Lorraine Hotel...and after his hand gets stuck to a girl's hair with paste, a giant of a boy is hunted by a vengeful mob.