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I don't always have a lot of patience with contemporary sci-fi and fantasy, but Vandermeer here tempers forays into pulp with a better-than-working-familiarity with the more postmodern and surreal threads running through 20th-century fantastic fiction, as well as that formative dread of the turn of the century weird. Which I suppose encapsulates all of what the New Weird sub-movement he's a part of promises in general, though I don't often find it so elegant in execution as in the three or four especially standout stories here, which push into genuinely strange, memorable, and original territory.

It's bits like the mostly unexplained conceptual tendrils, for instance, permeating "Three Days in a Border Town", which could be set in an ordinary post-apocalyptic world were it not for its yearning towards a de-localized, ghostly, there-but-not-there city promising something better than dusty present life. Or the reconfiguring of Pale Fire, reinvented autobiography, and rewritten bits of other stories, in "Errata". Possibly best of all, the otherworldly office politics of "The Situation", which remains unpredictable throughout by never totally resolving its terms, even as many scenes familiarly recapitulate drab contemporary day job existence. Not so incidentally, that story also offers prototype and sub-variant of Vandermeer's stellar most recent novel, Borne. Or the multiverse-spanning political nightmare in "The Goat Variations".

Other stories do fall more neatly into their categories, and suffer for it -- there's a steampunk piece, a myth retelling, a few bits of surrealism creeping into normal life basically in line with the original weird templates of the past. These will fade down in my memory before long, I'm sure. But then you have a story of a bear plaguing a small town with the techniques of a serial killer, that soon expands from horror yarn into a bleak commentary on how society treats its outsiders. Something familiar here is turned unfamiliar, then smarter and more knowing -- even as it basks in the pulpiest pulp it can offer. Which I can get behind. Sometimes I like to be entertained, it's just that so much ostensibly purely entertaining storytelling, and especially unfortunately horror writing, for me, feels limited and uncreative or else tips over into mawkishness, and I can't really enjoy it. This, more often than not, avoids these pitfalls.