<p>The hulking presence of her husband's menacing eyebrows finally drives Mary to violence. A warm Christmas story.&nbsp;</p>

10. The Unwrapping Party

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.