I am a little disappointed with these 9 longer length short stories. I've read at least 8 of Wilson's novels including 5 this year and they all have been good to great. I thought that several of these shorter works just don't measure up. Wilson is good at dreaming up big ideas in his novels and he has some big ideas here, but in this mix of horror and science fiction and a little dark fantasy and mainstream storytelling several of his proposals just come off as completely illogical and stupid. It is too bad because the writing here is excellent. Excellent as if you were reading a bit of literature, and the stories pull you in - it's just that some (most??) of these are just, let me say, crazy ideas as they play out.

Example? In 'The Perseids' a young woman gets preggers by an alien by absorbing static from satellite TV. There's more to it of course, and , it is draped with a bunch of drug mumbo jumbo that has nothing to do with anything, but that is the gist of it. That might have passed muster on an episode of "The Outer Limits" in the early 60's or the reboot but I expect a lot more from Wilson. The story that followed that, 'The Inner Inner City' played out as a dark fantasy/psychological thriller set in Toronto that kept my interest until a pretty unsatisfying end.

To be fair there are some very good stories in here as well as the creepy and weird.

I note that most people rate this much higher than I did, so ymmv. ( )

An excellent collection...

The fields of Abraham

The purchase of a telescope leads to an extra-terrestrial encounter...

The Perseids

A poor immigrant struggling to feed himself and his sister is trapped by a chess game.

The inner inner city

A competition between friends to design a new religion has a strange outcome.

The observer

Edward Hubble himself helps a victim of UFO abduction.

Protocols of consumption
.
A drug addict reminisces in prison on the strange powers over insects of his strange ex-friend.

Ulysses sees the Moon in the bedroom window

A neighbor has designs on his neighbors wife but a higher level of attraction is
hinted at...

Platos' mirror

A roue lives a life of easy pleasure until he acquires an unusual mirror, which shows the truth.

Divided by infinity

Starting with a widower buying a hitherto unknown sf-f paperback, reality seems to keep changing to preserve his life....

Pearl Baby

Something new and strange is born... ( )

I've read and never less than enjoyed (more usually been bowled over by) several of Wilson's novels but not encountered his short fiction before. This is his first and so far only collection -- nine tales, most of novelette length -- and it most assuredly doesn't disappoint.

If there's a weak story at all it's the last one in the book, "Pearl Baby", which was as elegantly and movingly written as all the others, but with a premise which failed to convince me and a denouement that didn't (as I'd anticipated it would) resolve that problem. But the remaining eight are of such a standard that it's hard to know where to begin in describing them; to try to select standouts among them would be futile. There are shared characters and background elements among the stories, most notably a second-hand bookshop called Finders whose proprietor is in some way beyond the merely human, but these details (as Wilson cheerily admits in his Afterword) aren't consistent and shouldn't be regarded as too important.

To my mind a more significant shared characteristic seems to be that all of Wilson's narrators/viewpoint characters are, to a greater or lesser extent, broken, incomplete, flawed characters -- their flaws in several instances, such as "Plato's Mirror", being a mainspring of the plot. In "The Observer" (the only UFO-related story I have ever read that I can remember much enjoying) there's no reason for us to believe that the narrator is flawed beyond her belief that she must be; in a sense the story is about her slowly learning -- thanks to the intervention of Edwin Hubble, of all people! -- that she isn't.

For most of Wilson's protagonists here, however, the discovery they make is that they have cause for even greater despair. They lose rather than gain loved ones. They lose what they'd believed to be the stability in their lives. In "The Inner Inner City" a transcendent being of some undefined kind, passing as human, takes it upon itself to steal the narrator's wife through plunging the narrator into a sort of spiritual quest -- obsession, really -- involving urban cartography: the search for that heart of a city which no map shows. Yet our narrator is able to place this heart on  the map he compiles, and even finds his way into "the inner inner city", half-realizing that it's a trap even as he does so:

What Michelle hadn't said, what Michelle hadn't guessed and Dierdre hadn't figured out, was that a temporal deity, even a minor and malevolent one, must own all the maps, all the ordinary and the hidden maps, all the blueprints and bibles and Baedekers of all the places that are or might be or have ever been.

As always, Wilson's writing is exquisite, his voice calm and restrained even when -- as in a couple of these stories -- the events are feverish. A wonderful collection. ( )

Beautiful little short stories that interconnect at strange tangents. Strange booksellers, impossible books, and the first story I've read where information visualization plays a powerful part in the story.

I'm looking for more from this author on the basis of these stories. ( )