With wildly imagined characters and jarringly unexpected circumstances, these stories exist in a kind of literary twilight zone. Yet they go beyond merely the creepy and strange, the odd and sometimes absurd, at times exhibiting a keen authorial understanding of human nature and a Kakfaesque pathos for the human condition. The dialogue crackles and the tales delight, and the reader cannot help but be drawn into the painstakingly crafted mise-en-scène, with its parade of fully rendered characters. In the end, the reader, now mesmerized, is left with the inevitable task of finding his or her way out again.