"Many children had imaginary childhood friends, the doctor informed us, and for some reason, sometimes these friends were not nice." So says 10 year-old James, desperate to protect his family from the demonic little man living in a hidden staircase in "Mr. Moum'a." The short stories of Adam Matson paint a portrait of American life that is by turns strange, cynical and hauntingly familiar. A college student sets fires to attract the attention of the girl he loves, until one of them almost engulfs her. A lonely autobiographer comes to the disturbing realization that not everyone in his life actually existed. A young boy has good reason to fear the angry yellow school bus rumbling toward him each day before school. Psychological, satirical, fraught with black humor and pathologies both real and imagined, the only thing Matson's short stories have in common is that no two are alike, and each takes the reader places they do not expect to go.