Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken—and occasionally sinister—lies beneath. The interactions of a woman and her driver in the opening story, “Flour,” are a case in point: She is well-off, but she invents an excuse to get rid of an expected weekend guest so that she can escape her daily life. The driver “spends the nights searching for the missing word in some Coptic riddle,” the woman tells us. That missing word figures in a folktale—Williams being a devotee of the genre—that echoes in the odd events that follow, ending at a destination that, the woman says, “struck me then as being utterly foreign.” In another story, a man is told he has cancer, then that he’s been confused for another patient but still has cancer. He tells his mother, “According to the doctor, I’m dying,” to which she replies, “Oh, well.” A talking dog tells an assistant at a writers’ retreat, “The river of indifference flows through the country of forgetfulness.” The mystical charlatan George Gurdjieff drifts down to Tucson, Arizona, to visit the childhood home of Susan Sontag, whom he adores; never mind that the chronology doesn’t line up. An ethereal child, perhaps a ghost, tells a woman, “Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.” All the stories here are lovely, and so skillfully written that disbelief is suspended forthwith. But the pièce de résistance is “Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child,” where the Slavic folkloric figure meets the murderous naturalist John James Audubon, much to the detriment of her pelican daughter, a searing fable of the destruction of nature and the ease with which humans do harm.

Working in western France, Slimak, author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature, discovered that a group of Homo sapiens had taken up residence in a Neanderthal cave 54,000 years ago and remained for 40 years. Neanderthals themselves did not vanish for another 12,000 years, according to the latest evidence. Also present were innumerable sapiens’ flint points, similar to those thousands of miles to the east, revealing that early sapiens already followed ancient, widespread cultural traditions. The points could only have been useful in arrows, so archery was found in sites 40,000 years older than its supposed invention. On the site are remains of an ancient Neanderthal, whom the author and his team name Thorin (after “one of the last dwarf kings under the mountain” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit). A few scattered teeth and bone fragments provide the first evidence of contact between sapiens and Neanderthals—so precious that his team spends seven years employing only tweezers to precisely tease out each particle and preserve its context. By the book’s midpoint, it becomes clear that the site illustrates contacts between sapiens and Neanderthals before they went their separate ways. This makes it a major finding. The author concludes that three waves of sapiens arrived in Europe over 12,000 years, which contradicts previous descriptions, and he elaborates on his hypothesis in details that will flummox readers not familiar with academic anthropological scholarship. The book’s second half defends his findings but emphasizes that no natural law governs the behavior of human societies, and thinkers who disagreed (Marx, Rousseau) are mostly known for being wrong. Readers searching for the details of human evolution should consult Ian Tattersall or Yuval Noah Harari. Slimak describes important findings, but his focus on their implications owes perhaps too much to his nation’s literary deconstructionists.

Alyte learns about the world through a series of encounters with other creatures, all of them trying to comprehend their place in a great chain of being. It’s a fairly terrifying adventure: He continually learns that eating or being eaten is part of everyday life, and that dying is “the natural order of things.” In the opening pages, his father has a bloody, fatal encounter while crossing a road but is able to drag himself into the water before he dies. His first friend, an exuberant salmon on her way upstream to lay eggs, expires after accomplishing her mission. Plonk, a friendly baby ibex, is carried off by an eagle and fed to its eaglets in front of Alyte. “Life doesn’t want me,” he laments at one point. But after a peaceful night cuddling with another toad, Alyte becomes father to a cluster of eggs that he must carry to the safety of a pond. Moreau explores the boundaries between water and air, life and death, nature and “lethalyte,” or “death incarnate,” represented by the road where Alyte’s father was crushed. The clean, dramatic illustrations range from full-page depictions of water, land, and forest to an appealing, though not quite peaceable, kingdom of fish, birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and trees, all engaged in the business of living and opposing the enemy lethalyte.

Born and raised in Los Angeles to parents who supported his dreams with love and money, Brown confesses to having been a low-performing student and a “jerk” to other kids around him. In high school, he broke the jaw of a popular class president who had humiliated him with a cake in the face following a stunt Brown thoughtlessly played on birthday celebrants. He never actually finished his formal education. But it was his passion for sports—first baseball, then kart racing—that saved him, he says, giving him a reason to think of how to get good at something and keep striving to be better. A decade pursuing race-car driving in Europe taught him he was not top-grade material behind the wheel, but while looking for sponsors he discovered a talent and passion for “deal-making,” which eventually put him on track to rise up in the world of sports management. A deal he negotiated between Crown Royal and NASCAR that led to the end of a decades-long ban on hard liquor sponsorship in motorsports (and other sports soon after) made Brown the first serious money to convince him he was on the right path. And up the corporate ladder he raced. Patient readers who suffer business clichés will find surprisingly humanistic principles in Brown’s lessons for managers and leaders: “You want a summary of my management style?” he asks. “I’m a democratic, diplomatic leader. A benevolent leader.” Not a pushover, by any means, he led his team from the basement to the top within 10 years, with a world-stopping pandemic in-between.

The urge to get even runs like a thread through popular culture: Creators who successfully harness that primal drive in their fiction have often built successful careers around it, such as Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino. However, the devil lies in revenge’s details, as author Epperson suggests in this technothriller, which is built around a simple yet hair-raising premise. On the popular and highly illegal KillStarter website, people can crowdfund and contract killings-for-hire at the click of a button: Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, with a high-tech twist. Users nominate potential targets, such as a drunken, bullying British lawyer or a racist, abusive American marketing consultant, and the murders are carried out, quickly and clinically, in return for bitcoin. For KillStarter’s creator—who, fittingly, remains anonymous for most of the book—the rewards lie in serving what they see as “the unseen hand shaping chaos, the mind orchestrating the unthinkable.” However, the game threatens to come undone after a viral frenzy breaks out around the nomination of a predatory Hollywood dealmaker, D’Wayne Robinson, who wastes no time barricading himself at his cliffside California home. The high-profile situation threatens to tear KillStarter’s tightly cordoned world apart. Monterey County Sheriff’s Deputy Lee Mann and FBI agent Miranda Walker have been investigating a string of murders related to the website and satisfying a public that loves KillStarter’s creator isn’t on their agenda. As Mann declares: “This isn’t about liking him; It’s about upholding the system.”

Epperson does an artful job of navigating moral gray areas as the chase ratchets up and Robinson’s potential assassins, who continue zeroing in on their target, are revealed. If the book has a weakness, it’s the relative lack of character development that Mann, Walker, and their colleagues in law enforcement receive. Instead, Epperson sketches them out in broad strokes, as regular Joes and Janes trying to do the right thing. Aside from Mann’s grief over the loss of his wife to cancer and his fiery, if somewhat predictable, “situationship” with Miranda, readers get few glimpses into these characters’ emotional worlds. Similarly, Mann’s computer-expert sidekick, Moss Pendleton, comes across mainly as a relentlessly chipper techie who’s a fan of cinnamon pastries. It’s a disparity that stands in sharp contrast to the villains, whose feral desires for control “over life and death in a world gone rotten” are amply and chillingly detailed. That said, many cyberthriller devotees may see this imbalance as more of a feature than a bug, especially in light of the ambiguity that Epperson weaves around the KillStarter architect’s destiny. This volume could provide a solid foundation for a franchise to explore the moral issues that the author raises so effectively. As it is, it offers readers a rollercoaster ride that brings to mind the chaos of an ever-changing political climate.