The Empire of Ice Cream

Mixing the mundane with the metaphysical, the pairings of the everyday and the extraordinary in this collection of short fiction yield supernatural results—a young musician perceives another world while drinking coffee; a fairy chronicles his busy life in a sandcastle during the changing tide; a demonic 16th-century chess set shows up in a New Jersey bar; and Charon, the boatman of hell, takes a few days of vacation. Storylines both conventional and outlandish reveal humdrum routines as menac…