Leve non, Lespri & Other Stories

Arches of gold framing the great blue welkin beckon to an undiscovered artist who finds himself in a tight pinch in "The Last Illumination of Patrick Drurey."

Haven't I seen you somewhere before? Always prepared to strike whenever an opportunity presents, immortals struggle for self-knowledge in "Look Within."

If you could learn the truth about any great mystery from the past, would you? Erasmus Woodruff reexamines his priorities in "Quod Inferius est Sicut Quod Inferius."

Although "The Boy Who Got Everything He Ever Wanted" inevitably failed to hold onto it, he always found a way to leave the past behind . . . until the day the lurking past succeeded in ambushing him.

Stories within stories within stories concatenate forever. In "Leve non, Lespri" Lyster Gaudin puzzles over his family's past, while the other occupants of a New Orleans bookshop crave knowledge of a decidedly more quotidian and lucrative nature.

These stories, and six others included in this anthology, carry the reader by turns into realms of hallucination, fantasy, science fiction, myth, magic and the spirit world and then, depositing us back into the world of sometimes pitiless mainstream reality, we're left "cutting our way through the thickets of mass culture, until the whole shebang comes shuddering to its final, inevitable stop."