At his best Mr. Boyle gives us strobe-lit documentaries of these crucial moments in his characters’ lives, as they clamber up the steps to the circus high wire, put one foot on the tightrope, take a deep breath and push off.

Of course, there will be some who find Boyle's palette garish, his characters cartoonish, his narrative fireworks mere antics of a strutting virtuoso. But Boyle is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Washington Irving, that American storyteller par excellence who found a perfect balance between art and pop, and who lived and worked not far from Boyle's own boyhood home along the Hudson River.

In most of these stories, Boyle seems interested in doing little more than hammering together a setup, sporting with it for a page or two, then pinching things off before his characters can spit the bits from their mouths and take things in directions of their own uncalculated choosing. In an assortment of tales concerned with nature’s wondrous insurgencies, it’s hard not to feel let down that Boyle largely refuses to let his stories jump the corral and take off running for the big dark woods beyond.