Good Night, Sleep Tight

This transfixing collection of 19 weird tales from Evenson (None of You Shall Be Spared) traps its characters in bizarre and dangerous situations. In “The Sequence,” twin sisters playing a children’s game access a strange realm that exists “just outside” their reality—a place that proves easier to enter than to return from. A stranded traveler in “The Rider” seeks help at a dwelling whose peculiar occupants subject him to strange domestic rituals that are both menacing and inescapable. Even when the world of a story is ostensibly ordinary, the characters who occupy it are not, among them the mother in the eponymous tale whose habit of traumatizing her son with scary bedtime stories hints at her possibly inhuman nature. A handful of entries veer into science fiction, among them the eerie, multipart “Mother,” whose characters are late to learn a startling truth about their circumstances. Throughout, Evenson’s narrators are credulous to a fault, accepting the increasing strangeness of their circumstances as unremarkable until there’s no turning back from their fates. The effect makes it easy to suspend disbelief and creates a palpable sense of tension. Fans of the strange and outré will relish this. (Sept.)