Some things are better left alone.

These are stories for the hour when the house has gone quiet and the street outside has emptied and the small sounds you had been ignoring all evening begin, at last, to ask for your attention.

They are stories about the thinness of the ordinary world, and about what waits on the other side of the thinness, and about the people — unlucky, or curious, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong hour — who find themselves on the wrong side of it.

Read them with the light on. Read them with the windows shut. Read them, if you can, with someone else in the house.

You will not, in any case, read them twice.