An abundance of losers, lovable and otherwise

The EPONYMOUS first story in John Kessel's new collection, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence," gets straight to the point. A hardscrabble ex-con is whisked with his sometime moll to a fantastical place where they're handed bags of cash. Easy, no? There's a single hint, a mere peek through the window, to set off alarm bells. By the time you figure out that Baum refers to L. Frank Baum, author of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," and that all isn't right in Munchkin land, the story's whisked itself to a happy ending.

Or has it? You can't be too sure in Kessel's speculative worlds, when even a sexual utopia on the moon can have its dark side. And beware anything actually marked "happy ending," as it's, at best, only ambiguously so.

Many of those worlds are curiously and ingeniously borrowed from other writers. Besides Baum, we revisit Mary Shelley and Jane Austen -- in the same story, no less -- and Flannery O'Connor. But Kessel's stories are to fanfic what plastic explosives are to Play-Doh. He shapes them from the perspective of troublesome minor characters, and it can seem rather fanciful until you realize their fuse has been lit.

In "Every Angel Is Terrifying," the sociopathic Misfit from O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" continues on after that story's horrific massacre. Renamed Railroad, he adopts the grandmother's cat, settles into a job as a short-order cook and begins a doomed courtship of his landlady. If Railroad sees the cat as some sort of good luck charm for a fresh start, the reader recognizes it as a medium eerily linking him to the family he's killed. And that certainly doesn't bode well for his landlady.

Kessel's also a master satirist: "The Red Phone" includes two lonely hearts whom we only get to know through intermediaries in one of the stranger, funnier telephone conversations ever imagined. A pity if there's no 900-line somewhere like the one in the story, manned by bored geniuses talking dirty to befuddled strangers. It's as if Kessel has explored an entire landscape of losers for this collection -- some of them lovable, some of them monstrous -- and often it's hard to tell.

Erno is one such creation, a teen typically fumbling into manhood in "Stories for Men" -- except that Erno is coming of age in a matriarchy where masculinity's no asset. "Stories" is the crown jewel of "A Lunar Quartet," which is set in futuristic colonies on the moon. In this, Kessel's world-building is so complete and seamlessly woven into the stories that the reader is dropped effortlessly beneath the colony's airtight dome amid leafy parks and juniper groves.