The Family Unit and Other Fantasies is a superb collection of darkly comic, largely fantastical stories set in our jittery, polarized, increasingly impersonal age. Whether it's the tale of a corporation that buys a man's family . . . two mysterious survivors of a super-storm who are given shelter by a gullible couple . . . an erotic adventure set during an urban terrorist alert . . . or a nightmare in which a man sees his neighbourhood being developed and disappearing at a truly alarming speed . . . these stories are by turn funny and frightening, uncanny and unnerving.