Ortega-Medina's language flows beautifully throughout this strongly-themed baroque collection of dark stories. The subtitle talks about love and obsessions but religion, sex, violence, and death are more obvious presences looming within those pages, all, in some way, set in a kind of liminal space.

Many of the stories are simple, twisted little vignettes, some of them with recurrent characters (some of them are gay), but the author seems to want to imbues other, more enigmatic tales with a symbolic meaning, although he never makes it clear what it may be.

Perhaps it is part of the mystery he is keen to inhabit, never letting the reader fully in, so much so that the reader emerges from this book a little dazed and perplexed. But not necessarily in an unpleasant way.