Last week, I received a copy of Andrew Porter's just-released collection The Theory of Light and Matter, recent winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction, and, if the opening story "Hole" is any indication, an excellent book.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of "Hole":

Tal liked having the hole on his property.  It was something no one else in the neighborhood had and he liked to talk about it when we camped out in the fort.  The opening was a manhole that Tal's dad had illegally pried open, and it led to an abandoned sewer underneath their driveway.  Rather than collecting their grass clippings and weeds in plastic bags as everyone else on the street did, the Walkers would lift the steel lid and dump theirs into the hole.  It seemed like a secret, something illicit.  We never actually knew what was in there.  It was just a large empty space, so murky you could not see the bottom.  Sometimes Tal would try to convince me that a family of lizard creatures lived there, just like the ones he swore he'd seen late at night by the swamp--six-foot-tall lizard people that could live on just about anything, twigs or grass, and that had special vision that enabled them to see in the dark. 

By the end of this story, my skin was crawling, and the finale delivered a very satisfying chill.  I'm looking forward to reading more of these stories, but in the meantime, read more about Andrew Porter at his website, or just go ahead and pick up a copy of the book.