But some stories are too detailed, front-loaded clumsily with character back story that drags down their momentum. Perhaps it’s the increasingly unnerving letters the story’s traveling salesman receives, including one delivered by a raven. Perhaps it’s the diarrhea and professional failure that befall the salesman when he ignores said letters. And perhaps it’s that the salesman ends up sweating and cornered by a terror, all because he failed to return a library book. Vivid and twisted, ironic and stirring, the varied stories in the collection are told with verve, even when blameless characters meet gruesome ends.

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Persons: sleepovers, Ogundiran’s, factly Organizations: verve