<p>Max's prodigious snout and extraordinary sense of smell are both a gift and a burden. His doctor must treat him, but at what cost to humanity?</p>

9. Burning Bush: A Christmas Miracle

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.