This is a nuanced work that constantly shifts between the inane and the macabre, between black humour and self-mockery. There is an absurdist, Kafkaesque twist to this collection in which the landscapes are sometimes recognizably our own but often, eerily, landscapes of the mind irrevocably altered by "water-light." From North Vancouver sleet and fog to palominos and Baghdad, from the inevitability of dying to the cockiness of flight, from Dick and Jane readers to insurance clerks, "The Fly in Autumn" willingly, knowingly, risks the reader's unease by going beyond the usual contemporary mode into language that is more penetrating, more tender than ironic.