Extracted from the maw of a resting shrew, these ten cankers reek of huff and qualm. A librarian teams up with a weeping bus-dweller to suppress a talentless writer. A man attempts a perfect equilibrium of pain and pleasure to forge a life of matchless keel. A triumvirate of Dans spiral into oblivion with operatic panache. Two sub-people struggle for ascension to the normal realm in a heckish caste system. Various narked sods explain the violent solutions to their popular problems in a tale that Butch Vig might call "titular". Someone explains the complex sociological web of mayhem that is the modern coffeehouse. Postmodernism makes a shocking return in a classic postmodern tale about postmodernism shaking its postmodern bahookie. In future Texas, women attempting abortions are held captive and forced to whelp at gunpoint. And in a finale one Dutch arborist has called "a botched stew", the world's unwritten characters mingle in a bardo where their untold stories flex and throb in painful collocation. For the first time in his life, the unacclaimed novelist M.J. Nicholls has written a collection of prose fit for hexagonal man.