<p>Jed is gifted a creepy doll from New Orleans that comes alive and mimes the actions of a real person somewhere else.&nbsp;</p>

6. Lurking

With wildly imagined characters and jarringly unexpected circumstances, these stories exist in a kind of literary twilight zone. Yet they go beyond merely the creepy and strange, the odd and sometimes absurd, at times exhibiting a keen authorial understanding of human nature and a Kakfaesque pathos for the human condition.