In Alan DeNiro's story "Our Byzantium," the narrator exhorts the reader, "This is literal; don't construe this as a metaphor." He is referring to the appearance of a halo around his now-estranged lover, but may well be describing the stories in DeNiro's debut collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. These stories traverse borders between the realistic and the fantastic so smoothly as to render those borders irrelevant, disarming the reader of easy distinctions and forcing them beyond what they think they know about fiction and life alike, and into imagining new possibilities for each.

DeNiro's characters often find themselves in worlds almost like our own, working in nearly the ways we expect our world to work, though altered to varying degrees of plausibility. "The Fourth," for instance, begins

At first, Indigo McCarthy hadn't realized that an agent from the Department of Agriculture was shadowing him. But he soon learned. The pursuit started at U.S. Postal Service Station #4245. The Ag agent was a mole in USPS, who'd requested a transfer to Vermontville, the tiny hamlet bordering the resort lake.

It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that there are Department of Agriculture agents embedded in the Post Office, but these details are so realized that they remain convincing even as the McCarthy family are surveilled and followed by an ever-increasing number of agents from multiple agencies, creating a surreal, paranoid fantasy of what seems otherwise like "ordinary" American life--typical even in the unspoken tensions between family members.

In "The Fourth," as in all of Skinny Dipping's best stories, artifice is so tightly woven into the story, and is so completely a part of the world, that the reader accepts the bizarre as easily as the characters do. This authorial sleight-of-hand casts a revealing light onto what would be taken for granted in most stories--the strained middle-class family, for instance--and suspends disbelief just enough so that everything, the familiar and the unknown alike, is opened to inquiry. Avoiding the assumption that the ordinary is inherently interesting, DeNiro makes it interesting in welcome, unusual ways. These are characters struggling to match the lives they find themselves living with the ones they expect might be possible, like the uncle in "The Caliber" sending postcard after postcard to his niece but never able to fit on them all he wants to write. The reader's attention is consistently drawn to those disjunctions between imagination and realization, but they never become melodramatic or familiar.

Even "Child Assassin," with a protagonist devoted to killing babies, renders its disturbing subject as almost--but not quite--ordinary. DeNiro writes of the assassin,

He wasn't into his profession for kinks. When he killed a baby he ended up crying a lot. He liked to wear muscle shirts that were a few sizes too large.

While in less daring hands the killer's apparent sympathy for his victims, and his guilt, would suffice to complicate an unsavory profession, here the mundane detail of "muscle shirts that were a few sizes too large" insists that we avoid even an assumption that our sympathy be placed where we expect it to be. In a time when the killer with a heart (or at least with emotions) is as familiar as ultraviolence, "Child Assassin" in particular manages to re-complicate what is familiar even in stories dependent on shock.

Taking the risks that he does, it stands to reason that DeNiro is more successful in some stories than others. "Quiver," for instance, the story of a divorced, lonely woman and the time-traveling medieval warriors she uncovers, never achieves the sympathetic and narrative intrigue of "The Fourth" or "Child Assassin" primarily because its narrator is too aware that her own world is--or has become--remarkable. Similarly, "If I Leap," about a girl who notices a boy falling from the same building without harm again and again, is weighed down by its own artifice--the story seems amazed by itself in a way most of the others avoid. The most engaging characters in this collection do not realize that their lives are in any way troubled any more than they realize that the world around them is strange. When, on the other hand, possibilities of strangeness present themselves as more obvious foils or metaphors, the complex ambiguity of sympathy and characterization so powerful elsewhere struggles to materialize.

In "Cuttlefish" DeNiro writes,

In all the world's oceans, millions of cuttlefish dip and sway, each of their eight tentacles aligning straight out, perpendicular to their bodies. A sign that even the boy, who has already shucked away his form, can't decipher. This phenomenon goes unrecorded in human history.

Those phenomena are the heart of this collection; when they are recorded and remarked upon by the author rather than his characters they are the richest, and make for thoughtful, ambitious writing and truly transformative reading.