"Museum of the Weird"

Museum of the Weird (Amelia Gray)

This is a very bizarre short story collection. Gray has a masterful touch when it comes to making the fantastic seem realistic and perfectly normal, which makes for some very interesting (and some quite gross) stories. My three personal favorites are "Dinner" ("When the waiter brought a plate of hair to the table alongside Beth's soup, it was difficult to be polite about it"), a story entitled "A Javelina Story" in which "a clerical error of impressive proportions" results in five wild pigs being dispatched to negotiate with a criminal holding hostages, and "The Suitcase", where a man seals himself in his suitcase and won't come out. This is wonderfully dry, even when his girlfriend is stopped at the airport trying to take him through security and sent to the airport chapel where she starts conversing with the priest ("'The devil out of this luggage,' he said.") A runner up is "Snake Farm", a series of increasingly frantic directions for visiting the SNAKE FARM.
All in all, my only caveat is that some of these stories are really disgusting; just don't read it right before dinner and you're good.

Grade A-