I became aware of Kevin Brockmeier’s work back in 2008 when Robert Shearman, in an interview with Eric Forbes, included Brockmeier in a list of writers “who play with the short story, squeeze as much out of it as they can.” Sadly, I’ve only now gotten around to reading Brockmeier’s short fiction, picking up his latest collection The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories. The book is the literary equivalent of a concept album, gathering together 100 ghostly vignettes and then breaking them up into 11 categories including, “Ghosts and Memory”, “Ghosts and Nature”, “Ghosts and Speculation”, and “Ghosts and Love and Friendship”. There’s even a Concordance at the back of the collection that provides an intricate spiderweb of links between each vignette. Given the length of these stories – none longer than five hundred words – and the singular nature of the topic, if I weren’t reviewing