WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALISTIGNYTE AWARD FINALISTIt's 1900, and Louise Wilk is taking her dying husband from Manhattan to the upstate orchard estate where he grew up. Dr. Edward Wilk is wasting away from a mysterious affliction acquired in a strange encounter: but Louise soon realizes that her husband's worsening condition may not be a disease at all, but a transformative phase of existence that will draw her in as much more than a witness. "At the bitter end of the 19th century, a loyal wife cares tenderly for her dissolute husband as he nears his death from a mysterious, gruesomely corrosive disease. Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum is a sumptuous excursion into surreal body horror and an unsparing exploration of the extreme frontiers of connubial devotion. Ruthnum delivers a uniquely unsettling Gothic love story-and it is first and foremost a love story-evoking the grisly Edwardian tales of W. W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, while drawing in such modern masters as Barker, Del Toro and Cronenberg. Brief enough to be read in an evening, it holds certain images so grotesque that they will linger in your dreams for weeks. "-   David Demchuk, Award-winning author of The Bone Mother, and RED X