Ah, that's taste for you! The first story was my favorite, but I enjoyed the way she played with fragments and structure throughout the collection. The story that was an inventory, the story that was episode recaps, the story that was literal and growing gaps in memory (and also dresses), the one about missing parts of one's own body -- that all really resonated with me, who is interested in what happens when there are gaps in a narrative or continuity that have to be filled up somehow. (Thanks, Saidiya Hartman and Dionne Brand and decimated Jewish family history.) I thought the way she allowed things to remain unspoken, and asked the reader to try to stretch strings across those big empty spaces, was done very deftly, while at the same time providing a lot of pleasure via what was there on the sentence level. I really enjoyed her way of writing fairly short, but not choppy, sentences with relatively simple vocabulary but a lot of color words, unexpected verb-noun combinations, and rhythmic paragraph-level structure. It made much of the text feel sort of dreamy and unreal, which is a favorite prose-mood of mine. Yeah, and I also just liked the conceit of urban legend retellings -- it was obvious to me she was very influenced by Angela Carter, but this was like the "low culture" version of that, and I never felt that she was setting herself up to be immune to the silliness or oddity or baroqueness of her source texts, be that fireside stories or zombie movies or Law and Order. Instead, she would happily include that into the stories themselves. (Admittedly, "The Resident" is a bad short story. But the rest made up for it, for me.) Also, great cover. I like the throat-corset.