Dark and Other Stories

Dark and Other Stories is a collection of haunting tales set in the twilight of the Twentieth Century. Computers were new and telephones were not yet old, and electricity was coarse and unrefined. In ''Dark,'' we explore what might feed on old-fashioned raw electricity, under conditions that only seem normal when not examined too closely. As ''Hanging Valley Breakdown'' suggests, you can run and you can hide but it would help to know what you're actually running from, on this very small planet. In ''Remote,'' two veteran newspaper journalists learn that while unexplained disappearances can be hard to solve, it's the unexplained appearances that turn out to be impossible to crack. ''Banjo'' asks, where is the past, with all its ghosts? Possibly we are the past, and maybe we are the ghosts. In ''The Stony Point Poltergeist,'' visitors who knock first don't always wait for an answer before coming in. In the final story in this collection, you can't expect all the coordinates to match up like they're supposed to when you're ''Off the Map''. As in the otherworldly riddle stories of Jorge Luis Borges or the dark imaginings of Ambrose Bierce, fact and fantasy are not so easily separated in the architecture of Dark and Other Stories.