It's such a treat to read a book of short stories as good as this one. Elizabeth McCracken has a wonderful way with the form, creating entire worlds that can be lived through without the length of the novel (although that said, there were a couple I wouldn't have minded being a lot longer, at least a novella). She roves through the real world with the occasional touch of other-worldliness and does it so confidently that I believed everything she told me, hook line and sinker.
The characters themselves talk about ghosts, and vampires, and wolves, and it's not that these things appear, but the unknown, the hovering darkness just beyond our peripheral vision, is always present. It's in the stories kids tell to scare each other, such as in the opening story Something Amazing when kids taunt each other with the threat of a child ghost, to the irascible Peter Elroy telling the children of his former friend stories that will give them nightmares. Sometimes that hint of other-world comes in a different form, such as in the title story (or novella), in which a brain-damaged child and her father find a way to reach each other that's simultaneously creepy and wonderful.
McCracken is so good with setting scenes. Here's the opening to "The House of Two Three-Legged Dogs":
"In the December rain, the buildings around the town square were the color of dirty fingernails. Still, the French had tried to jolly things up a bit. Decorations hung from streetlamps, though at midday, Tony couldn't tell what lit bulbs would reveal at night: A curried prawn? A goiter? People had dangled toddler-size nylon Father Christmases out their windows, each with a shoulder-borne sack of presents. There were dozens of Father Christmases, and they hung slack, sodden, like snagged kites. They looked lynched."
I wish this book had been longer. It's one to savor.