The short stories in this collection are so weird and surreal that I couldn't help but fall completely in love with them. Most, but not all, involve dogs in some way, whether deformed, half human, talking, or whatnot. A lot of the stories don't seem to have any obvious point, but the detail, dialogue, and quirky plots more than make up for that fact. Some of my favorite stories include "Mollusks," about a man who finds a giant slug and thinks it will bring him great fortune, "The House of Alan Matthews," which involves a mysterious man in a closet, "The Snow Frog," in which a woman swallows a strange worm, with interesting results, and "Chainsaw Apple," about a man who attempts to gain small-town fame by carving apples out of people's mouths with his chainsaw.I love bizarre stories, and reading these made me really want to write some of my own. Bradford seems to really celebrate imaginative characters and scenarios with his writing, and the overall tone fits in really well with the weirdness of these other elements. The whole book was a really refreshing read, and I hope the other things he has written are just as awesomely weird.
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