The dragons of Springplace Book

I took a while to warm up to this collection. The first two stories were dark, and I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic. I was eventually won over by the imagination and depth of the stories that followed, however. Two of my favorites were "The Remoras," about a cautious woman who elects to alter her body and live as an alien, and "The Shape of Everything," about an elderly scientist telling a colleague about a defining childhood experience at summer camp. As with Neil Gaiman's writing, I think I prefer Reed's short stories to his novels (so far), where his imagination and ideas are liberated from the need to construct a complex plot.