Having recently come to grips with the fact I just don't care for Saunders's work all that much--blasphemy of blasphemies, etc.--I finally got back to finishing this collection after a year-long pause. It's probably my favorite of his stuff. Less low-rent sci-fi/speculative-fiction/whatever and more touching my black little heart. He still often feels like he's skimming the surface of things and has little of an ear--or chooses to pay little attention to how people should sound, feel, anyway, the prose tending to the artificial and sometimes ugly--which can make it hard for me to care for his characters, but most of these stories have a substance that's caused them to stick with me. 
 "Victory Lap" and the title story are unrelentingly urgent, tense, with characters' lives in the balance. In "Puppy" and "Home" characters address particularly painful situations and choices. The short-short "Sticks" is a blend of the oddball and the moving, everything coming together so fabulously in such a short space that I think it might be the most enjoyable Saunders story I've ever read.