ON THE ROCKS

White lightning in printed form.

The roster of writers who have read/performed their works at the KGB Bar in Greenwich Village over the years is an embarrassment of riches, no doubt. But an anthology of this sort can be a dangerous endeavor, sometimes resulting in first-name authors submitting third-rate material, the editors hoping that readers will be drawn in anyway by the marquee stars and KGB’s retro-Commie cachet. All such fears are put to rest when one cracks open the first of the 20 stories here, “He’s Back,” by Victoria Redel. An oblique cascade of scenes about a mother and child who spend an inordinate amount of time bathing, it turns sharply and darkly toward a husband’s violent dissatisfaction with family and life. Philip Gourevitch follows up with “Mortality Check,” which takes a simple pick-pocketing incident and morphs it into a Raymond Carver–esque tale of failed marriage. The stories here indeed often delight in beginning with the ordinary and taking them beyond the pale, though never in an expected fashion. Francine Prose’s “The Witch” injects a creepy hint of the supernatural into what should have been a routine piece about a chronically squabbling couple, while Judy Budnitz’s “Hook, Line & Sinker” kills the standard-issue my-parents-are-trying-to-set-me-up-with-a-doctor bit of dating-insecurity fluff that it could have been with this line: “I save used condoms, labeled and dated and sealed in Zip-Loc baggies in the freezer. I figured I might need them one day when I was old and lonely and ugly.” There are numerous other treats: Jonathan Lethem’s amusing and off-kilter “Planet Big Zero,” Thom Jones’s short, slashing tale of a young girl’s obsession with a homicidal maniac, “Thorazine Johnny Felsun Loves Me,” and Elizabeth Tippens’s ode to suburban ennui, “Make A Wish.”

Enjoyable, terrifying, addictive: the kind of anthology readers deserve.