There are other things to say about “Last Stories” before we return to the topic of maggoty love. There’s the matter of this book’s title, and of its opening note to the reader, which declares: “This is my final book. Any subsequent productions bearing my name will have been composed by a ghost.”

Image William T. Vollmann Credit... William T. Vollmann

This is Mr. Vollmann playing the trickster, and you should take this notice about as seriously as you took Stephen King’s retirement announcement in 2002. (Mr. King was 54 then; Mr. Vollman is 54 now.) Viking will be publishing a new novel in Mr. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series, about the settlement of North America, next summer.

Another thing to say about “Last Stories” is that it’s a phantasmagoric book, blending bits of Lovecraft and Dreiser, David Foster Wallace and Scheherazade, Poe and the Brothers Grimm, to mostly muddled effect. These stories pivot around the globe: Some are set in Mexico or Japan, others in America. A few are set in the present day, such as a story about an American war reporter returning to Sarajevo.

But Mr. Vollmann’s abiding interest here is in folklore, in tall tales, in ancient hatreds, and it’s a topic that plays to all of his weaknesses as a writer and few of his strengths. This book is humorless, indifferent, close to unendurable, a word pudding seemingly written on autopilot. Its plot movements appear to have been decided by throwing 10-sided dice.

Mr. Vollmann’s sentences are long and winding roads, as encrusted as Klimt paintings, and difficult to pull quotations from. But here’s the opening line of one story, “The White-Armed Lady”:

“Inside the tiny white house, he sat at the head of the table, listening to the sea gulls, his stare fettered from below by the white lace tablecloth, whose flower-whorled spiderweb knew how to trap his eyes, and occluded by the low-hanging lamp, whose candle never guttered within that scalloped breast of glass.”

“Last Stories” is an anthology of lines like this one, so suffocating (as Clive James once put it about a book about Leonid Brezhnev) that, if read in open air, they will make birds fall stunned from the sky. Mr. Vollmann doesn’t lash his research and his sentences into tight bundles, as he does in the best sections of “Europe Central” and the Seven Dreams saga.

The necromancy, and the necrophilia, that creep into “Last Stories” are unsettling, but here Mr. Vollmann seems alert, committed to his material. His antennas are erect. His verbs suddenly aren’t planted an acre away from his nouns.