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Almost two decades before George Saunders published the everybody's-talking-about-it book, Lincoln in the Bardo, he published Pastoralia.

Pastoralia is a collection of six short stories, and they are some of the weirdest, bleakest, and most well-written ones I've ever encountered.

As I worked through (struggled through) each one of them, I kept asking myself, Are these dystopian? I tend to think of "dystopian" as futuristic, or containing more futuristic elements, of government-imposed rations, restrictions, etc, and these stories are not like that. However, when I looked up the actual definition of the adjective "dystopian," this is what I found: "relating to or denoting an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one."

Okay. So, yes, they're dystopian. And more.

The first one, "Pastoralia," the lead story of the collection, is the longest and the weirdest. I think his editor made a mistake placing this in the first position. I found the story beyond quirky and unrelatable, and I would have been done with the entire collection after this weird tale, had I not told my sister I would read this book.

The second, third and fourth stories were so dark and depressing, I wished I'd had a cup of Kool-Aid and a cyanide capsule to go along with the book. Reading about the people in these stories is like having a nightmare in which a former reality-tv host is the president of the most powerful country in the world, and waking up to discover it's true.

In the fifth and sixth stories, I finally got to sit back a little and think, "Damn, Mr. Saunders, when you're not depressing the hell out of me, you can be funny and a little bit romantic, too. It made me hopeful to read Lincoln in the Bardo.

But, of course, the last sentence of the collection left me sucker-punched in the gut. Who is this guy?

I'm hesitant to recommend this, unless you're a reader who likes to smack your shoulders up against the edge, or if good writing supersedes all else for you.

Four stars for excellent writing, originality and memorable, though disturbing perspectives on humanity. . . that I hope, despite our current despair, are not true.