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3.0 

Out of Body

By Jeffrey Ford
Out of Body by Jeffrey Ford digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

After surviving a violent crime, a smalltown librarian begins leaving his body—and discovering dark secrets—in the award-winning author’s fantasy thriller.

Owen is a creature of habit. Every morning just after seven a.m., he picks up his coffee and sweet roll at the local deli where he would invariably see young Helen Roan behind the counter. Then one morning changes everything for Owen. That morning, he attempts to save Helen from being murdered . . . and fails.

Soon Owen discovers just how much the experience has changed him. What had once been routine sleep paralysis begins to transform into something far more disturbing. The trauma, it seems, is driving him out of his own body. The town he knows so well is suddenly revealed to him from a whole new perspective. Secrets are everywhere and demons fester behind closed doors.

Worst of all, Owen discovers a serial killer who has been preying on the area for over a century . . . one capable of traveling with him through his dreams.

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52 Reviews

3.0
Thinking Face“I loved the atmosphere. I would stay for that. There was something cozy and whimsical about the OBE, despite all of the events that unfolded in the back half of the book. Ultimately, it was the end of the story that got me, and part of what led up to it. Frankly, it was everything after the unveiling of the vampire painter. It became a little less believable at that point, and the epilogue just sent the rest of it careening downhill. I feel that were things that went unexplained, but I can chalk that up to the story being shorter than most. What I can’t get past is that after everything, Melody died, and Owen continued to live a dismal existence. He had that painting restored with extra money from his parent’s house, and it was the same one completed by the sadistic painter who did art with human entrails. He never did OBE again, and he saw Melody as a cord cutter before he stopped. All I can say is, why did it have to end that way?”
“this book got my heart pumping but i wish the ending had more meat to it. it felt so rushed. i wish we got to see what happened after it all”

About Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. Ford has published over one hundred short stories, which have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edgar Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Japan’s Hayakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award.
 
Ford’s fiction has been translated into twenty languages. In addition to writing, he has been a professor of literature and writing for thirty years and has been a guest lecturer at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, the Stone Coast MFA in Creative Writing Program, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. Ford lives in Ohio and currently teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University.

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