A garden fed by lightning

Marshall Moore's short fiction is propelled by a scathing wit and a dark imagination, and he does not shy away from taking readers down roads that are less traveled and rarely even mapped. In the title story, a con man cons a beguiling con artist... or does he? In "Grape Night," a new arrival in Hong Kong enjoys the pleasures and terrors of a wine-tasting party with visiting gods from the Greek pantheon. In "Underground," the minotaurs who secretly control urban life welcome a new member of their bloodthirsty elite. And in "Cambodia," a country's genocidal past and its cosmopolitan present collide atop a ruined temple. In A Garden Fed by Lightning, as in his two previous short-story collections, Moore spans multiple genres of fiction and subverts them all.