Four tales of self-destructiveness from the forgotten time of the early 2000s. If I hadn't looked at the publishing date, I could have guessed the era from Neil's job editing the spicy classifieds & sex ads in the back of an alt-weekly, or maybe from Hillary calling a payphone... which people answer! Despite the familiar settings, all of these stories are deeply weird. It's hard to say which of these stories was the most bleak, but I'd have to say Hawaiian Getaway is my favorite. I did love the line in “Alter Ego”: “she told me. About Sacramento”, which allowed me to feel some dramatic excitement about my staid hometown. The endings of all of the stories were left ambiguous, but I can picture what I think the epilogues would all be.