The Changeling - Joy Williams
The night after finishing The Changeling, I had a nightmare so bad that I lashed out with my left foot while asleep and smashed my big toenail. Such is the degree that this book got under my skin. An inspiration for short story writers like Kelly Link and Karen Russell, The Changeling is essential reading on its own merits as a story about parenting, animals, the mundane and the starkly and horrifically transcendent.