Not Millhauser's best work. While credit should be given to him for practically inventing literary Steampunk, his stories often metastasize into sprawling, overwritten inventories of minutiae in service to god-knows-what. The first story in the book is 60 PAGES when it should have been 20, tops. While I'm not a fan of characters just sitting around talking about their feelings, and Millhauser certainly knows how to create atmosphere, he tends to revisit the same territory to the point of predictability: Endless rhetorical questions are asked of the reader, there's bound to be a "warren of hidden rooms," architecture is described ad nauseum, weird sexual repressions rooted in childhood ...

And not to sound like a MFA creative writing workshop millennial malcontent working undercover for the PC Police, but I don't think I've ever seen a single person of color in any of this stories. I could be wrong about this--I guess Sinbad counts--but even that story has all kinds of painfully clunky allusions to apes and primitive cultures. Millhauser rarely employs dialogue and when he does, characters pontificate pretentiously as their onstage. One of the stories, "Klassik Komix #1," is sectioned into panels--but the the story itself really offers nothing at all other than the (literal) framing device. Not to snark, but Robert Coover, Jesse Ball and Brian Evenson do this sort of thing much better and more concisely. Millhauser doesn't get out of the house much, I would guess. His writing often feels closed-off and 2-dimensional when a short story needs to have 3 or 4 dimensions--something beyond clever conceptualization racking up a high word count.

I still love Millhauser. Stories like "The Dome," "In the Reign of Harad IV," "A Visit" and "Eisenheim the Illusionist" are masterpieces. And this is a very early collection of his (1990)--so one must bear that in mind. His more recent stories are, IMHO, better.