In "The Taste of Blood", a lonely young woman, hauntedly by memories of her childhood, wanders upon a group of men watching the naked body of a dead woman who has just been pulled from a river. The occurrence leads to an increasingly cryptic and threatening encounter with the two police officers who are handling the case. In "Kyoto", an American tea-drinking school in Japan is the setting for an absurd and very funny bet, which has surprising philosophical implications. And in "Isaac", the chillingly abrupt narrative mirrors a boy's tragic attempt to escape from the horror of a boxcar on its way to a concentration camp.

In these stories and in the thirteen others in the volume, Blatnik's vision of the isolation, self-deception, violence, and emotional deterioration of human experience, though powerfully rendered, is tempered by a light fictional touch and ahumane sense of humor and irony.