God I can't stand this kind of stuff. Gothic in all the wrong ways: an impasto of overwrought and phantasma-gopping imagery slathered onto a scanty and tired-out thematic trellis. Poe wrote the way he did because there was no better way to express his extremely weird body of phobias and neuroses, but at the heart of these stories there seems to be nothing except the desire to imitate Poe. Actually, it reads like pastiche.

No noun is unencumbered by at least one adjective, which results in redundancies like "crepuscular gloaming". There's chronic overuse, and sometimes misuse, of sixth-form showoff words like "subfusc" and "hieratic". Banalities ("mirrors are ambiguous things") and orientalisms ("the birdlike fluting of African dialects", "the clatter of demotic Japanese") abound. Women don't have periods, they have "their menses". The sex (more rape than sex, actually) scenes are maximally cringe-making in a thigh-rubbing, 70's way: "he thrust his virility into her surprise". After the first two stories I only skimmed the rest, but it still left me feeling like I needed a shower.

Of course, of course there's a tale about puppetry. Stories featuring puppets are invariably annoying, being Exhibit A and Pinocchio no exception. Anyway, Angela explains how puppets work: "the master of marionettes visualizes inert stuff with the dynamics of his self." Got it.