<p>You hear a noise in the other room, but is there anything you can really do to keep your family safe?</p>

7. The Canary in the Coal Mine

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.