Surrealism is the name of the game in Darren Speegle's collection intriguingly titled A Dirge for the Temporal. Here are thirty-four effective little nuggets of darkness as filtered through a sort of reverse prism. Most seem to plop the reader in the middle of some mysterious play, one where you missed the beginning—and the end might play out behind the curtain, after the audience is gone.

Too long to qualify as flash fiction—except for "Clockwork" and "rhyme or reason, Dear God"—(see Michael Arnzen's 100 Jolts, same publisher, for more flash fiction) but occasionally too frustratingly short to be considered "full" stories, some of them work better as vignettes or eerie anecdotes with interesting but often unexplained implications. Perhaps an acquired taste, most nevertheless engage the mind—and the senses—acting as teasers for what might have been, or stimulating the imagination to fill in the outer edges and beyond. Most work very well; those that come close require patience and an understanding, a sense that the author is working his own niche. One can make the Ligotti and Poe comparisons, but while there are echoes, Speegle's work does not yet display the density. Perhaps it's too surreal to strike home each and every time, but with thirty-four tries, one would expect a high ratio of hits, and there are indeed numerous chewy morsels.

"The Whole Circus" may illustrate what happens when artificial intelligence becomes too human and inherits our vices. In "Illusions of Amber" a serial killer appears to be trapped in a small-town carnival (an "affair") in which he will become an exhibit—but as in many of these flabless storylets, one has to wonder if that really is his new prison? "The Crookedness of Being" may be the feeling you get when you cross Christmas Eve in a bar on the Waterfront with noir and surrealist tendencies. What really happens in the title story, "A Dirge for the Temporal"? I'm not altogether sure, but it involves Gypsies and a French woman who might be a murderess, but then again, she might just be insane because her instructors "never appeared in human form . . ." "Merging Tableaux" is one of the more grounded tales, about an 18-year old crime and a witness returning to the scene to confront or resubmit to the beautiful killer. "Rapture Zone" is a more traditional monster story, sort of Lovecraft on steroids, mixing a desert war against subterranean creatures and a vengeful woman in a cinematic free-for-all that spans its length. Two of the best are "The Smell of Sex," a superb tour-de-force in which shared bodies mate with like others, and "Junkyard Fetish," a creepy tale of twisted vengeance (or something). It's telling that the strongest entries, such as these last two and "Last Days of Solitude" are also the lengthiest.

Sometimes it seems obvious that Speegle prefers to create a mood with subtle language and poetic images, not necessarily heading into standard beginning-middle-end story territory, which can be refreshing after a steady diet of familiar monster and evil town stories . . . on the other hand, these skeletal tidbits need to be taken in small doses to avoid blending into a haze of similar, if effective, tensions.

The mood of the collection is appropriately funereal throughout, given its title. Though some turn out to be head-scratchers, most of these brief compositions are head-spinners in the very best sense, loosening our grasp of reality with impressively economical language. While it will be interesting to see Speegle tackle longer lengths, his voice is one of those which merits attention simply by his determination to go his own way. If you prefer your fiction grounded in ultra-realism, you'll not likely appreciate these exercises in bizarre obfuscation. But if you're into characters who speak as if they hold arcane knowledge, whose actions reflect a grand design not immediately obvious to most, or whose principal trait may well be madness, then A Dirge for the Temporal will fit the bill nicely and balance out the more typical horror fare.