One Day Closer to Death

Highlighting this collection is an ingenious new episode in the saga of Jimmy Blackburn, the eponymous serial killer of Denton's third novel. ''Blackburn Bakes Cookies'' might best be called the icing on the cake that is Blackburn's story, and it is appropriately delectable. Other highlights of this collection include: ''The Territory,'' a ''what if?'' story revisiting Kansas in the days of the Civil War and imagining, in one small way, how things might have gone a bit differently; ''We Love Lydia Love,'' a science-fictional examination of the ways in which modern obsessions with celebrity and stardom can change us...and the ways in which we'll never change; and ''The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians,'' a moving and funny trip to the afterlife, where all great comics go when they die. In assembling these stories, Bradley Denton discovered that all of them are concerned with some aspect of death. It's true. And yet (as they say), in death there is life: these eight tales brim with such vitality and joie de vivre that readers will find themselves enjoying the work of this fantastic storyteller again and again.