Humanity and Imagination 
 Three of these six stories are grade A, and two A+; even though I found the title story virtually unreadable, this still comes out as five stars in my reckoning. And readers who enjoyed Johnson's Pulitzer Prize novel, The Orphan Master's Son, would probably like this final story too, since it might almost be a spin-off from that book; although the setting is now South Korea, the main characters are defectors from the North, not at all liking everything in their new home. 
 But that one didn't matter, since the five others were so very, very good. Two I thought were superb, because they used inventive narrative techniques to explore serious moral issues. "Dark Meadow" is the online handle of a man who makes his living ridding computers of malware, including some embedded in kiddie porn. But as you read on, it is no longer clear whether he is a cybersamaritan or a very real predator. Yet when you learn how he got that moniker, perhaps you begin to understand. And if you're a man, you may find yourself looking deep into your personal mirror. 
 The protagonist of "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" is the former warden of the infamous Hohenschonhausen prison in the former East Berlin, now run as a museum of STASI torture and abuse. Amazingly, Johnson manages to keep the warden sympathetic for almost the whole of the story, even as you come to realize that the things he is denying were almost certainly true. As the story comes to its ambiguous but I think morally appropriate ending, you marvel at Johnson's ability to avoid pat answers, even with issues so strongly charged as these. 
 The other three stories are also strong. "Nirvana" has another computer programmer hero. He has managed to create a holographic simulacrum of a recently assassinated President, but what gives the story humanity is his relationship with his wife, who may be dying of a rare (but real) disease. There is another dying woman (cancer this time) in "Interesting Facts," with another devoted husband; what makes it so interesting is that this appears to be a portrait of the author through the eyes of his hopefully-fictional wife! "Hurricanes Anonymous" is set in Lake Charles, Louisiana, among the population displaced by two almost successive hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. Its principal characters, a UPS driver and his girlfriend, are forced into desperate straits to care for his two-year-old son, but the ending, though still ambiguous, ends in a welcome wave of hope. 
 Indeed, that is the quality of all these stories. Although written about death, loss, perversion, and torture, they are all surprisingly positive. That is tribute both to Johnson's imagination as a writer, and to his humanity. [Reposting this review from Amazon almost a year later, however, I find that very little has stuck in my memory, which is why I have dropped the final star.]