Taste of the Tenderloin

Haunting, lyrical and often uncomfortably realistic, this slim collection of eight short stories plunges the reader into the darker side of San Francisco. Altered states of consciousness—minds changed by grief, chemistry or too much hard living—are everywhere. In “Magic Words,” an advertising executive pays a homeless woman a high price for transient success. Poignant and plausible almost to a fault, “Tombstones in His Eyes” twists the horrors of drug addiction into something harder, sharper and scarier. In “The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee,” a brokenhearted father's descent into insanity—or is it merely invisibility?—makes normalcy seem all too tenuous. The best story of the bunch, “5150,” documents the final moments of a worn-out cop about to retire. O'Neill's deft, authentic prose resonates with the weight of sad reality, erasing the line between knowledge and fear. (Aug.)