With this second collection Matthew Francis fulfilled all the promise of his first, Blizzard. His teasing out of the bizarre or esoteric leads to a world populated with dragons, devils, butterflies, and a whole ocean full of creatures from whales and cuttlefish to the denizens of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. But strangest of all are the human beings - the ecstasies and indignities of their sexual rites of passage, the routine craziness of their dream lives, the frantic and sometimes terrible adventures of recent and not-so-recent history.