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Moby-Dick in an alternate world, but the whalers are the ones being hunted. Body horror, eroticism, mutiny, nature taking revenge, gods of the deep, bigotry, capitalism at its harshest, a main character with a secret (and then another, and another), a steadily mounting sense of dread—this book has it all.

So far (a little past halfway thru) I’d say this is Herman Melville meets Castle Rock. I’m enjoying it.

None of the writers in this collection came to play nice with the Nazgûl. Plenty of anger and pain and body fluids in these stories, and fantasies of revenge and fantasies of justice and tenderness and hope that even if the forces of good don’t prevail they’ll go on fighting. A couple of stories even feature repentance and attempts at making amends. Strong stomach required.

Similar in concept to the movie Inception, but this novel came first and is more firmly in the surrealist tradition. You don’t think things can get more absurd than the opening chapters, but they do. A riot of Freudian and Jungian psychology, folklore, occultism, sex, violence, and—most savagely irrational of all—the internal politics of organizations.