Written with fierce, brutal energy, these stories are rich with language and often bitter emotion and threaded through with tough, hard-boiled cool in the face of unreasonable horrors. Bit of a puzzle box , too, many of the stories even more interconnected than on previous volumes, recurring characters, recurring events from different points of view, jumps forward and backward in time, shocking, disorienting, unflinchingly honest, luridly inventive and generally as unforgiving as the harsh badlands his characters struggle through, physical, mental and spiritual. The proper way to see out 2016 in my humble estimation - contemplating unthinkable horrors to come.