Kwame Dawes puts the “reggae aesthetic” to work in these stories of contemporary Jamaica. His characters murder, go mad, abuse, love, create, seek personal salvation and the fullest expression of their sensuality with an astonishing but wholly believable intensity. The stories question how a society of such violence and disorder can function, and how it can be portrayed without either sensationalism or passivity. For Dawes, it is creativity that redeems. The collection rises to heights of towering myth in “Marley’s Ghost,” a story of soaring imagination that will surely raise the hair on the back of the reader's neck.