Late Night Caller, The

Is reality simply what we see, taste, smell, touch and hear? Or is there more to our surroundings than the tactile and the visible?The stories in The Late Night Caller explore a world where magic is a profession, where knowledge is a weapon, and where the fabric of what is real bends and folds in upon itself, chafing dimensions against each other.An office worker exercises his urge to stand perfectly still in a fountain outside his busy building, just to see how the other lunching workers will react. A young executive is shouldered with the task of firing two professional magicians from the lucrative traveling circus he oversees. A late night visit from a beautiful woman shakes up the idyllic lives of a suburban couple.This cryptic collection weaves itself around the central notion that with philosophical flexibility comes metaphysical freedom. But not without a price. In The Late Night Caller, characters are trapped by the knowledge that should set them free, haunted by a loneliness that no amount of worldly learning can cure, and stuck in circumstances so surreal that control isn't even an issue. Their worlds can never connect, but are intimately connected in the fantastic and the banal, sometimes brushing one against the other, but never by each other seen.