It took a long time to finish this, despite (or perhaps because of) it being 41 stories in 180 pages. Actually, since Sallis isn't really very interested in narrative, calling them stories is a stretch. They are mood pieces with recurring themes - separation of man from woman, alienation, art, literature, and in story after story, descriptions of the shapes of women's breasts (this happens so often you just can't help but notice.) Some pieces verge on horror, fantasy, or science fiction. Some are "literary" types that are as good an evidence as any for the death of the short story (TV isn't all to blame.)

I really wanted to like this, as Sallis can be a fine writer. If one reads these pieces as poetry, most of them are more effective. Some of the most entertaining ones are collections of paragraphs of Sallis's random, quirky thoughts, shot through with a macabre imagination. The end result, however, even when reading these over a period of several months, is one of incompleteness - in fact, I share much of Sallis's outlook as expressed in these stories, so perhaps I don't need it fictionalized and thrown back at me. I'm looking for a little more narrative, which is what you get with Sallis's noir classic, Drive, for instance. Like many of these pieces, it also has a narrative that seems to come out of a fog, but the duel between hunter and hunted at the center of it provides the glue that holds it together so you can enjoy Sallis's skill as a writer. ( )