The first good short story I ever wrote, “Pop Art,” was heavily influenced by Malamud’s “The Jewbird,” and my ideas about collections were shaped by his. A book of stories isn’t a novel and can’t have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It’s like a road trip. You’re staying in a different inn every night: One evening it’s a romantic Victorian B&B with a supposedly haunted gazebo out back, the next it’s a cruddy Motel 6 with what looks like old bloodstains on the ceiling. The places where you stop to rest and dream are unique—but the road is the same, always waiting to carry you on to whatever’s next. And when it’s over, you’ve arrived someplace new, someplace (you hope) with a good view. A place to breathe deep and take it all in.

I hope it was a brisk, fun road trip for you. I hope you roared along at full throttle. It took a little longer for me: I wrote the oldest of these tales in 2006, while the most recent was finished a few scant months before we went to press. That’s slightly more than a decade, which is also roughly how long I took to write the tales in my last collection of short stories, 20th Century Ghosts. At that rate, barring tragedy (and can anyone bar tragedy?), I hope to write somewhere between thirty and fifty more short stories before I’m done.

That might be morbid, but if you’ve read this far, it’s kind of late to complain.

Some readers are always curious to learn how a story got written and what was on the writer’s mind when he wrote it. How did those bloodstains get on the ceiling in Room 217? And is there any proof that a pale woman in a lilac dress haunts the old gazebo in the yard? I don’t have all the answers, but maybe I have a few. The interested should proceed. Those who are satisfied with the stories alone, thanks for riding with me this far. I hope you had a thrill. Let’s do it again sometime.

INTRODUCTION: WHO’S YOUR DADDY?