The Spider's Web: A Novella and Other Stories

The Spider's Web is an allegory set a half-century ago in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama. The story's action is timeless. As earth-shattering as a simple tale by Joseph Conrad or as strangely symbolic as a gothic mystery by Carson McCullers, it is as real and as timely as today's headlines. In these stories of growing up in Alabama in the 1950s, Wayne Greenhaw reaches into his bag of tricks to deliver sleight-of-hand drama that cringes through a hot night as frightening as a solitary woman's scream. It crawls down the spine of the reader witnessing the making of a monster in small-town suburbia. And it is as beautifully nostalgic as a whippoorwill's call at twilight in the delta of south Alabama. Woven through all of the stories in The Spider's Web is Thomas Morgan Reed, our central character, as he struggles toward manhood, wisdom, and redemption. In a shorter version, Wayne Greenhaw's title novella, "The Spider's Web," won the national Hackney Literary Award for short stories. Many of the related short stories were originally published in literary quarterlies. The author of dozens of pieces of short fiction, four novels and numerous works of nonfiction, Greenhaw began writing as a teenager shortly after he spent months in a children's clinic undergoing spinal surgery, much like Thomas Morgan Reed in The Spider's Web. At the University of Alabama, Greenhaw studied creative writing under legendary professor Hudson Strode. He also attended the writing center at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Greenhaw's first novel, The Golfer, was published in 1968 by J.B. Lippincott Company when the author was twenty-eight years old. Greenhaw is also author of several stageplays and a screenplay of his novel, The Long Journey. He lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with his wife, Sally.