Fiction. I SHOT THE HAIRDRESSER, David Gilbert's first collection of short stories, is crisp, uncompromising and darkly satiric. In the title story a disenfranchised urban artist fatally shoots a small-town hairdresser and convinces the local population of the legitimacy of his act as "performance"; in "Three Picture Deal" a fairly successful director of horror films is left, literally, to his own devices when his wife and daughter are reduced to mindless, babbling zombies by an alien gel; in "False Bottom," the novella-length story that concludes this selection, a young woman meets up with her high school sweetheart in the weeks following a worldwide "rapture," only to discover that he's the Antichrist.

Drawing on everything from American pop culture to ancient mythology, bringing together genres as diverse as "B"-grade horror films and "language" writing, David Gilbert hammers out a solid and often terrifying vision unique in contemporary literature.

David Gilbert is the author of You Asked for It, a chapbook published in 1990 by Post Neo Press, FIVE HAPPINESS, a book-length acrostic poem in prose published by Trip Street Press in 1993, and most recently the story collection I SHOT THE HAIRDRESSER, published by Detour Press in 1994. In 1987 he won the Small Press Traffic Award for Poetry.