This is the first fiction I've read by P.D.Cacek, despite her being a Bram Stoker Award winner. My loss.

Leavings contains 13 short stories, covering a variety of styles. The best description I can think of is contemporary dark fantasy, with a touch of horror.

Cacek has a superbly twisted imagination. There are many excellent ideas here. Nothing too outlandish, nothing gory or too explicit, not too many explanations - my kind of fiction.

My personal favourite is "Mime Games" (wonderful title). A woman is raped by a mime artist in front of a cheering crowd, then extracts an appropriate revenge. It's a nasty, scary story which made me laugh! It also has considerable depth, with Dickian overtones about the nature of reality. How much do we create reality out of fantasy? How much do we attempt to undo reality by refusing to acknowledge that which we find painful? To what extent are we prepared to accept anything in the name of entertainment? How implicitly guilty are we? This is a story that is a great light read yet also has depth. A gem.

There are other great stories in here as well. The scope is vast: Gilgamesh hunting a unicorn, Merlin visiting a psychiatrist, New York made uninhabitable by the smog, a young girl dying from cancer. Cacek doesn't waste time trying to justify the strangeness of her worlds, rather she concentrates on the way the characters act in them. There are some very real people in here.

So, much to praise. And yet. And yet... There is a flaw at the heart of this collection. Several of the stories here suffer from a fatal flaw - they re just too damn long. Despite the excellent writing these stories just can't justify their length. Almost by definition these few bad stories take up a considerable proportion of the pages in the book.

An especially bad culprit is the title story. An interesting idea, believable characters, well written and moving. And twice its natural length. The only word for it is "self-indulgent". The introduction explains that this particular story is very personal, which perhaps explains the excess length here. Unfortunately it's not the only time it happens; The Princess, The Birthing and Under the Haystack also need severe pruning.

It's a shame that so many otherwise good authors feel the need to overwrite. Those stories where Cacek has restrained herself are superb. They are let down by those that are just plain tedious. Overall that makes for a mixed bag with high highs and low lows. You will probably find a couple of stories in here that will stay with you for a long time, which is more than can be said for most collections.