Haunted Worlds

Jeffrey Thomas. Hippocampus, $20 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1-61498-197-8

Superior prose elevates the 14 uncanny stories in this collection from Thomas (Thirteen Specimens). “Spider Gates” describes the divide between fantasy and reality as less of a clear, fixed border and “more like a low stone wall, overgrown with leaves and half tumbled down, that you can step over quite easily.” “The Toll,” in which an exhausted man has a spooky late-night experience at a toll booth that presents him with an extreme moral dilemma, demonstrates Thomas’s adeptness at developing a fully realized character in just a few pages. Another highlight is “The Green Hands,” which opens with the lead desperately seeking to stay out of the clutches of some strange people before flashing back to his first encounter with them after a blackout, when a pair of luminous green hands pressed against the darkness of the front window of the chain bookstore he was visiting. Not every entry is a winner, but David Lynch fans will appreciate the ease with which Thomas injects terror into the mundane. (Aug.)