Now, I like weird, especially really weird. The lead story, "Conjuring the Disclaimers" by Colin James, however, strikes me as being weird for the sake of being weird and nothing more. It has got something to do with a guy named Needles who during his hospital stay suffers from questionable fashion tastes, performs a naked martial arts exercise, and meets two brothers who commit "reality disorder." While my problems with this story may reflect my own intellectual limitations as opposed to the author's excesses, it is just too abstruse to bother trying to figure out what the hell James is getting at here.

For those who might have a similar reaction, don't despair. It gets weirder in more interesting ways. "Midwiving the World" by Michael Bishop may seem similarly incomprehensible on first glance, but a more careful reading reveals something genuinely recondite in pondering the unique and at times compulsive power of language. The grotesque reality of "One Window" by Scott Thomas in which the protagonist meets a ghastly fate provides a horrific metaphor for the character's psychological state. That's also the intention of Vera Searles in "The Waiting Room," though not as fully realized. In "O Goat-Foot God of Arcady," Brian Stableford presents a woman whose mid-life crisis has driven her into prospect of a lackluster marriage to a bioengineer. This is the only remotely science fictional tale with its characters speculating on theories of cross species genetic manipulation, though the Great God Pan intervenes to save the reader from the pedantic exposition of so much hard SF.

The bleak inevitability of fate, and the lack of control we have over its relentless march despite our lame efforts to forestall it, is the subject of the "The Rain King" by Michael S. Gentry:

"The rain," croaked the shrinking nurse," is good." She ran her crooked twig-finger along the side of an empty crib, carefully wiping the dust away. "The rain clouds shield us from the burning eye of God." The caretaker heard her, but said nothing. He finished folding the last of the linen sheets and placed it on top of the stack in one of the other cribs. The chamber was full of cribs, all of them empty.

Not as outright funny, but sure to evoke a smile, is "Ye Old Epherma Shoppe" by Carol Orlock. It is perhaps the most accessible story here, a sort of John Collier yarn of an antiquities dealer who comes upon some unusual goods and makes an equally unusual arrangement to acquire them and pass them on.

The standout stories are "A Lesser Michaelangelo" by T. Jackson King and "The Apocrypha According to Cleveland" by Daniel Abraham. The former is an allegory about deviancy and suffering to create great art, while Abraham's parable of the ineffable and perhaps meaningless nature of reality that lies beneath the myths constructed to give the appearance of an orderly universe is already on my "Year's Best" list. For my money, it doesn't get any better weird than this.