Ray Clardy’s Song of the Rat is a collection of four supernatural romances; expressing the otherworldly quality of love and sex that shatters the mundane, Song of the Rat explores the liberating sense of self-erasure sought in both the erotic and the fatal. In Song of the Beast, a child cursed with immortality must pursue the girl he loves, watching her age before the completion of a mysterious ritual. In Song of the Swan, a Nabokovian old man lost in self-parody (and humorously clad in the pop-punk uniform of his youth) contemplates the dark trajectory of his fate. In other stories, a young man must struggle through his own psychosis while completing a trans-American Odyssey, and a sleepless lunatic engages in a philosophic conversation with the Devil. A neo-Gothic rollercoaster merging the classic with the modern, Song of the Rat is a thoughtful horror about the innate darknesses which lurk within our most idealistic fantasies.