With the crime rate falling but angst about crime continuing to rise, writer Cliff Burns skillfully captures the anxieties of modern life. In The Reality Machine, he offers 15 stories that startle without showing a bogeyman, that disturb when all seems placid, and that transport without physically moving the reader.

These surreal short stories are set in a literary valley where science fiction is on one hillside and the horror genre on the other. For the most part, the stories have little plot; yet Burns offers such raw imagery, such precise wording, and such odd, intriguing settings that these stories are engrossing. His knack for disturbing, punchy dialogue and description is also an asset. In “Place of Meeting,” he describes an aging waitress: “[She] dragged her feet and her thighs had worn holes in her nylons. Cancer had eaten her ovaries and one day would be back for seconds. And she wouldn’t mind one bit.”

While Burns’ incendiary ideas and surprising turns of phrase keep his shorter stories afloat, his longer pieces, such as “The Gumby Man” and “New World Man,” often fail. The milieu of these stories is still as involving, and the stories do have a narrative, but the endings, while suggestive, seem artificial and leave too much unanswered.