This collection of Alan Moore’s short fictions contains five stories that have been published elsewhere – mostly in smaller, indie print venues – and four entirely new works. The opening story, Hypothetical Lizard, is a queer surrealist revenge tale written in 1987, while in Cold Reading, originally published in 2010, a real ghost takes revenge on a con artist who performs fake seances.
All the others have been written in the past three years: highlights include Not Even Legend, in which a strange creature moving backward through time infiltrates a group of friends who investigate supernatural phenomena; The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, a self-conscious tribute to 1960s new wave science fiction that chronicles the sexual escapades of a Boltzmann brain in the first femtosecond of creation; and American Light: An Appreciation, in which Moore flaunts his ability to capture the essence of American beat poetry and 1980s literary criticism while satirically undermining both.
