This book collects the work that writer Grant Morrison has produced to date outside the comics medium. As Stewart Home points out in the introduction, a Scottish writer like Morrison can be easily separated from the Rab C Nesbitt scenarios of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh by the simple fact of his possessing an imagination, a quality always lacking in the Deliverance-like backwaters of British fiction. Would Irvine Welsh write a story about HP Lovecraft? No he fucken wouldnae.

The two longest pieces here are plays: the award-winning 'Red King Rising' about the relations (real and imagined) between Alice and Lewis Carroll and Depravity concerning the magickal works and life of Aleister Crowley. The biographical and thematic territory of the Alice books has been mined many times, notably by Dennis Potter; it's to Morrison's credit that he manages to bring new readings to this area. The dialectical structure explores Charles Dodgson's motives in writing the Alice books and also their resonance with other currents pervading the late Victorian world: the Red King of the title not only refers to obvious chess and phallic imagery but also to Lenin and Jack the Ripper, amongst others. Depravity exhibits the same broadening agenda. Centring around rituals in the Sahara Desert when Crowley with poet and lover Victor Neuberg conjured the demon Choronzon, there are constant references to other cataclysmic events at the turn of the century, tying Crowley's role as midwife of the Aeon of Horus to the breakthroughs of Freud and Picasso. It's worth noting here that Morrison has cited the brilliantly imaginative playwright David Rudkin as an influence in past interviews. Rudkin's plays are similarly concerned with the interplay of memories, dreams and reflections, showing the same interest in the processes by which unconscious forces (psychic, sexual and historical) manifest themselves. Rudkin's powerful work has been ignored for nearly two decades now (no coincidence that it fell from favour in the 1980s) and is long overdue for rediscovery.

The four other pieces are short stories. In the Sadeian 'The Braille Encyclopaedia' a blind girl seeking escape from monotony finds a destiny far more disturbing than anything in the tamed Books Of Blood. 'The Room Where Love Lives' is a pastiche of the psychic detective tale which, though funny, seems disappointingly slight. Far more impressive is 'Lovecraft In Heaven', a description of HP Lovecraft viewing his life in extremis which mingles fiction and biography in a similar manner to 'Red King Rising'; the images are striking and memorable. Morrison demonstrates a confidence and authority moving across the fictional spectrum which would elude many mainstream writers. The final piece, 'I'm A Policeman', a satire of millennial pop-culture insanity in the last hour of 1999, is the kind of story whose exaggerated depictions are so accurate they are bound to be surpassed by the reality they lambast all too soon (probably next year, in fact). One of the characters, a fashion-obsessed airhead called Diana, has already departed into history.