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synopsis

“What can be added, once death has the last word?”
       Mari is a young temple-dancer trained to perform The Dance of Kali, an exotic ritual alleged to summon death itself. Maxwell “Maxie” Jones is a working class musician performing on the cruise ship circuit. When fate throws them together, their lives become hopelessly intertwined. For Mari, it’s love at first sight, but Max has other things on his mind and sees her dancing as a one-way ticket to fame and fortune.
       Max wastes no time in bringing Mari to New York where he incorporates her dance into his act, billed as the dreaded Dance of Death. Then the accidents start happening. Each of them can be explained rationally, but is there something else going on? The deaths add an air of danger to their act that only fuels their popularity, sending them on a global tour that crisscrosses the globe, taking them from New York to Montreal, Milan, Buenos Aires, and Panama.
       But while everything seems to be going smoothly on the exterior, tensions are crackling beneath the surface. Max displays little interest in Mari and seeks his affections elsewhere. As Mari grows tired of being used as an accessory, she begins to take the reins of their relationship into her own hands.
       Death Is My Dancing Partner is many things: a supernatural mystery, a rags-to-riches tale, a seedy tour of the 1940s nightclub scene, and a savage exploration of human relationships, where love quickly turns to hate, and loneliness is an inescapable force. Though underappreciated in its time, Cornell Woolrich’s penultimate novel adds a unique horror twist to the author’s signature style, while serving up one of his most unique characters in Mari, an innocent woman cast as death’s reluctant agent.
       This special edition is a true find for Woolrich fans, representing the first time this elusive work has appeared in print since its original publication in 1959. It features an introduction by writer Jack Seabrook, who offers a reappraisal of this unfairly maligned work, while exploring the important place it occupies in the context of Woolrich’s career.
       Whether you’re revisiting this unique horror classic or experiencing it for the first time, you’re sure to find yourself entranced by Woolrich’s uniquely morbid world in which fate is cruel, happiness is elusive, and death is just a short dance away.