A review by kelseyland
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories by Michael Chabon

4.0

A pretty solid collection of creepy short stories edited by Michael Chabon, who is a pretty well-known champion of genre fiction and the short story format and definitely puts his money where his mouth is here. He gets some pretty heavy-hitting contributors, too; for my money the whole collection is worth it just for [a:China Miéville|33918|China Miéville|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1243988363p2/33918.jpg]'s "Reports of Certain Events in London," which uses the awesome old-school framing device of "author just happens upon random documents of undetermined origin." It has a super-creepy [b:House of Leaves|24800|House of Leaves|Mark Z. Danielewski|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403889034l/24800._SX50_.jpg|856555] vibe, and you can also see Miéville messing around with some of the ideas about how public space is defined and shared that crop up later in [b:The City and the City|4703581|The City & the City|China Miéville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320475957l/4703581._SY75_.jpg|4767909], so that was pretty neat.

I also liked [a:Daniel Handler|7176|Daniel Handler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1403033761p2/7176.jpg]'s "Delmonico," a straight-up detective story with a badass lady protagonist, as well as [a:Joyce Carol Oates|3524|Joyce Carol Oates|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1454307466p2/3524.jpg]'s super-creepy "The Fabled Light-house at Vina del Mar." I am quickly starting to have the opinion that everything [a:Stephen King|3389|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1362814142p2/3389.jpg] has ever written is brilliant, which hold true for "Lisey and the Madman" here even though it feel a little incomplete.