Chris Adrian’s stories, collected in A Better Angel, play out in an abnormal and frightening territory. Ghosts and psychopaths and demons haunt every page, interacting with twisted and desperate characters. With each new tale, Adrian focuses on a special brand of suffering or sadness, like a pathologist fleshing out wounds in a corpse.

“High Speeds,” the first story in the collection, couples a sarcastic and bitter adolescent malcontent with a deranged substitute teacher. Drawn to the darkness in one another, they dare into increasingly dangerous high speed car rides. The second story, “The Sum of Our Parts,” is told by the disembodied spirit of a suicidal woman awaiting a liver transplant. As she eavesdrops and spies on the hospital staff, she longs for them to let her body surrender to death. In a final ghostly embrace with an unhappy lab technician, she glimpses the human connection previously missing in her life. “Stab” chronicles the high jinks of a young girl, budding into a psychopath, who befriends the mute, surviving twin from a conjoined pair. She eventually turns her knife on her new found friend, bored with killing neighborhood animals.

Adrian’s shockingly brutal stories are not for the faint of heart. On the other hand, there is a strange hope that pervades the collection. Not every character finds relief from their suffering, but Adrian infuses each lost soul with a rugged and gripping beauty in the way they face it.

In addition to a sharp and creepy imagination, Adrian is blessed with a singular gift for language. Whether writing in first person narrative, as in “High Speeds,” or in omniscient point of view, like “The Sum of Our Parts,” he maintains a solid narrative and always uses vivid and colorful prose.

Not all of the stories reach the same height as the first three, and some are unusual enough to inspire serious head scratching. But even the weakest story is thought provoking.

Bottom Line: Frightening and sad stories worth the reading if you have the stomach for them. You won’t put the book down thinking that this author is recycling already over-used ideas. ( )

I wasn't really engaged by this book. The stories did a bad job of drawing me in, and I didn't think any of them were especially good. Most of the book's content (the characters' language and actions, the vivid descriptions of gore) seemed to be there just for shock value, but I wasn't especially shocked—more like bored. ( )

Chris Adrian’s stories come wonderfully alive with their pitch-perfect voices of children who seem wise beyond their years – if only because we as adults have forgotten what a terribly strange place childhood is. They are stories layered with humor that is often dark and bizarre and of a tone that is so true to its characters inner lives that it is often shocking. These are nearly perfect short stories that should be read by everyone who wants to re-visit the multi-layered lives of children – lives that are rich with strangeness and all too often off the radar of the adults whose care they are in.

The nine stories were generally disturbing and sometimes shocking, but I can't remember the last time I was as intrigued and fascinated by a collection of short stories. Sometimes, that fascination was akin to watching a car accident unfold before my eyes. More than once I grimaced at the visuals depicted on the page, especially those involving animals. Of the nine stories, some had more impact than the others. The floating spirit, the teenage short gut patient, the parent of the changeling, the pediatrician's angel, these are some of the characters which will stay with me. All dark, all flawed and all dealing with recent losses and troubled lives. As a recent widow, I connected to some of these characters in their inability to handle the grief and loss. Overall I found this to be a compelling and memorable book. ( )

I'm going to swim against the grain here and say that most of these stories rubbed me the wrong way.

My least favorite was the first story. This probably unfairly colored the rest of the collection for me, but the elementary-aged narrator struck me as particularly unauthentic - it read more like an emo teenager than a nine year old. I'm not the type to assume that the inner life of a child is never anything but sweetness and light, but I have been a precocious kid and this story struck me as an attempt to be edgy rather than any attempt at meaningful narrative.

This sense of intentional edgy-ness was heightened by the couple of stories that drop in references to the 9/11 tragedies, seemingly out of nowhere and to no serious purpose. I had a strong negative reaction to these stories (and not in the good, makes-you-think way) and again, was left feeling that the author threw those in solely as an attempt to shock. Kids in these stories don't just get possessed by demons or have strange visions, they get possessed by 9/11 demons and have 9/11 visions. It certainly isn't impossible to work the events of 9/11 into works of art (this isn't a 'too soon!' argument) but in these stories it felt like cheap emotion and cynical capitalizing on a tragedy.

That said, there were a few stories that I did enjoy, usually those that dealt with believable inner lives and no gratuitous burning towers. Therefore, two stars. ( )