Aptly described as a "serial novel," Mondo Desperado—a fine new collection of short stories from The Butcher Boy author Patrick McCabe—is a headlong rush into human grotesquerie, ferreted out in installments like an especially lurid comic-book series. McCabe's answer to Sherwood Anderson's seminal small-town portrait Winesburg, Ohio, the stories take place in Barntrosna, an otherworldly village where isolation leads inexorably to delusional fantasy. To add another level to the high concept, the tall tales are relayed by one Phildy Hackball, an invented author persona that both removes McCabe from the telling and gives the impression that this bizarre manuscript comes directly from the source. After an amusing "appreciation" of Hackball from one of his drinking buddies, Mondo Desperado drops in on the Barntrosna citizenry, each of whom tells his or her story in the first person. Since loneliness breeds eccentricity, they never actually connect, but their lives are all governed by dreams, and some are relatively happy. In "The Luck Of Dympna Wrigley," the title character leaves her ailing mother ("a wheezing assemblage of badly baked turnover loaves") for Dublin, hooks up with a pimp, and finds the man of her dreams. In the wryly satirical "The Big Prize," another fortunate soul wins a literary award for writing a book about Barntrosna that's more than a little reminiscent of McCabe's (or Hackball's). But the majority are lost in cartoonishly horrific nightmares, whether imagining the worst from a cherubic apprentice to the priesthood ("I Ordained The Devil") or bearing witness to a mutated breed of half-human creatures akin to The Island Of Lost Souls ("The Valley Of Flying Jennets"). Fashioned in the mold of dime-store paperbacks, Mondo Desperado is populated by thinly conceived caricatures, but it relies more on the seamy surrealist pull of the language to bring its stories across. With his half-drunk, virtuoso prose style, McCabe contributes to a long tradition of Irish eccentrics, but the twisted fictional universe of Barntrosna is unmistakably his own.