THE BOOK OF DISBELIEVING

Nine fantastical stories showcase alternate realities in which characters confront or conform to systems of belief that threaten their worlds.

In “The Great Fish,” the opening story of this debut collection, a society spends generation after generation on the back of a gigantic whale. In “The Tower,” another civilization gradually makes its way up from one floor to the next of a giant building, never considering making its way back to earth. In the darkly wry “Spring Leapers,” characters of a small Southern town celebrate “Leaping Day” on the first Sunday of every spring, jumping off buildings in hopes that at least some of them will, in doing so, make their way to heaven. Some of Morse’s stories are more predictable than others: “The Market,” in which teenage girls are auctioned off to future husbands, unwinds pretty much as one might expect. But even Morse’s least surprising stories benefit from his ability to craft richly developed characters. These stories, engaging though their ideas are, never simply rest on those ideas but place them in intricately detailed, realistic settings. His more subtle stories, set in worlds very like our own, are even more insidiously intriguing. In the title story, a custodian finds, after the death of his wife, a series of diaries describing the details of his own work life at great length. Are they fiction, or did she somehow observe him? In “The Watch,” a mother of young children receives a gift from her dying father, a watch that unaccountably stops at 3:27 a.m. every day, a mystery that makes her rethink her whole existence. In these varied stories, Morse reveals a similar ability to interrogate the mundane and find its surprising secrets.

Provocative tales bound to raise questions about the reader's own assumptions.