<p>A canary fights to take flight from his family legacy in coal country.</p>

8. Max's Colossus Proboscis

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.