A bewitching brew of Coover short stories

"Going For a Beer: Selected Short Fictions," by Robert Coover. Norton. 416 pages. $26.95.

This is a riveting, elusive, phantasmagoric, weird, delightful, grim and farcical collection of Robert Coover’s selection of short stories from 1962 to 2016.

The collection dazzles, defies logic at times, and invents variations on everything from “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” to the Pied Piper, Hansel and Gretel, Noah’s Ark, the Invisible Man, Punch and Judy, mysterious islands and dark forests, magic pokers, magicians and too many rabbits, the Phantom of the Opera and Martians, a deliciously sexual encounter between Rick and Ilsa from “Casablanca,” various cartoon creatures and his most famous tale, “The Babysitter” (1969), which may or may not involve dead children, rape, a corpse in the bathtub, the wreckage of a house and a wandering husband’s eye (and other organs).

Coover’s imagination is so rich, demonic, outrageously funny and passionate that as you emerge from one story, you can’t wait for the next one to begin.

Within fables and fairy tales, dreams and nightmares, he explores “the darkness of the human world ... the darker aspects of the human condition.” The plots and games teeter on the edge of the abyss, of the void at the heart of the human soul, determined to invent, create, avoid, deny, entertain and dance.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Terror and comedy become siblings, both sinister and silly.

Coover recognizes that “new endings can be imagined, old rhythms broken,” and stories can be reshuffled, contradictory, enigmatic and playful as farce and fatalism pirouette on each other’s gallows. At one point Goldilocks wonders, “To stay at home is too dull. To dance with the wild things is too terrifying. Is anything just right?”

Yes. Storytelling is, in whatever direction and by whatever design. Perhaps Coover’s "stubborn romanticism [is] not a search for meaning, just a wistful toying with the idea of it," but the human imagination remains unlimited here, however much dread may intervene and laughter curdle and caress.

Coover, a professor emeritus of literary arts at Brown University, is one of our best writers, and this collection underscores that judgment with boundless desire and imaginative bliss.

— Sam Coale (samcoale@cox.net) teaches American literature at Wheaton College.