Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm, and today I'm really thrilled.

William T. Voorman is here. He's written a new book. It's called Last Stories and Other Stories.

It's a collection, but not just a random collection, of supernatural stories, erotic supernatural

stories, stories about going beyond this world to the world of ghosts and creatures.

And it wowed me.

I want to say that I seem to be in a minority.

Okay, I am, as usual. But I loved this book. When I was last

looking at it, some statues were leaving their stands, being brought to life, falling in love

with human beings, and attending the funeral of some pussy cats, a funeral thrown by the

great surrealist painter whose work I didn't know before, Leonor Finney. And as far as I'm concerned,

if you don't want to go, you don't go, but if you can let go and follow into a truly magnificent and different imagination.

Nothing like this in William Vollman before, nothing like this in Edgar Allan Poe.

The only thing I can think to compare it with is E.T.A. Hoffman, the great German Gothic writer.

We're going to begin. We're going to do it very unusually because there's a note to the reader, and I feel it's like a gate to the book.

And unless you make friends with this note to the reader,

...