There is one new story in the book, a very long novella (nearly novel length): "Botch Town". This is a pitch perfect and rather sad evocation of childhood in a lower middle class New Jersey suburb. The title refers to a model town that the narrator's brother constructs in his basement -- somehow their sister, who is in some way brilliant but not very comprehensible, seems to use this town to reflect real happenings in their own town, including the whereabouts of a mysterious visitor who may be connected with the disappearance of a neighborhood boy.

There are many other jewels here. "The Annals of Eelin-Ok" is a tender, bittersweet, story of a Twilmish, a creature that colonizes a sand castle and lives only until the castle is washed away. "The Beautiful Gelreesh" is quite different in mood, a sardonic piece about a doglike creature with a rather extreme means of curing depression.

"A Night at the Tropics" concerns a cursed chess set and the bully who stumbles into possession of it. The story is framed in a very Kiplingesque manner: the narrator, named Ford, tells of his return to his childhood house, and a visit to a bar his father frequented, "The Tropics." It is there that he again encounters the bully, and hears the tale of the chess set. And, much as Kipling so often and so brilliantly managed, the frame ends up blending with and enhancing the central story. (And, to my relief after Ford's denial of the Stevens reference in "The Empire of Ice Cream," his introduction here explicitly acknowledges Kipling's influence.) "Giant Land" is a story many won't have seen, from the delightful tiny Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, about a woman's curious travels after her escape from giants.

I won't mention the other stories, but I'll say that they are a varied and intriguing lot. The book itself is a lovely physical object, as we expect from Golden Gryphon. And Ford's introductions are fairly brief but very interesting, definitely significant value added. This is surely one of the best story collections of the year.