They say that as one sense fails you, the others strengthen. For British writer Michael Stone, who is nearly blind, his imagination has exploded to compensate. The quartet of stories in his collection FOURTOLD are rich with detail and imagination.

“San Ferry Ann” follows a would-be magician and a so-called medicine man who sells pills that give its takers painful priapism. They’re traveling with very little on their backs when they come across a naked young woman, ill and in need of help. They seek shelter and food, and find it … and something more.

The cover art finds its inspiration in “The Reconstruction of Kasper Clark,” a nightmarish story of a deformed man whose gash of a mouth is located on his forehead. Inexplicably, he finds a girlfriend who agrees to marry him, but only if he gets his mouth fixed.

“The Terracotta Warrior” is Stone’s version of ye olde weird tale, with an adventurer who finds the title object, out of which pops a “naked devil” who runs away and wreaks havoc. I gained a sizable amount of fun out of the characters’ miseries.

Finally, “The Lemon Man” is one who appears in the twisted dreams of a middle-aged man suffering from hallucinations and plagued sleep. Adding to his woes is that his marriage — to a woman described as Debra Winger to his Richard Gere — is in a serious state of disrepair.

Not one of these pieces treads trails of predictability. Stone’s speculative stories are a peculiar brand of fantasy and horror, tinged with an ominous air of anything-can-happen mystery. The narrative occasionally stumbles into holes of incomprehension, which requires a bit of decoding or added attention, but he clearly has a gift for the delightfully disturbing. —Rod Lott

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