There are a lot of magnificent worlds in Margo Lanagan’s head. With her latest collection of short stories, Yellowcake, she once again drops the reader in the middle of these lands and into the lives of the characters that attempt to navigate, make sense of, and survive the remarkable events these locations suffer. What always impresses me about Lanagan’s short story collections is not the remarkable settings she establishes, but how she will dump me in the middle of these places without apology for the lack of explanation. Instead, she teams the reader up with a rapidly developed character and a compelling human conflict, allowing this person to walk us down distorted corridors as we all grow together.

The ten tales from Yellowcake, collected from numerous short story collections over the past few years, offer no exception from this remarkable formula. Each of her past three collections has provided me a story that seems forever ingrained in my head (for the record, “Singing My Sister Down,” “White Time,” and “A Feather in the Breast of God,” from Black Juice, White Time, and Red Spikes respectively). I’m not entirely sure which story will hold the same distinction from this new collection, but if I had to wager a guess, I’d promote “An Honest Day’s Work,” for its incredible transition from the ecstasy of a windfall for an impoverished people to mortification at the realization of the humanity of their pending fortune. It is a great example of the emotional wringer Lanagan’s stories can put a reader through, yet somehow done with a compelling wonder.

Eluvium’s latest double-CD release, Nightmare Ending, is my first real exposure to the artist. For its rich composition of instrumental genius, the fact that I found it a bit…happier…than music I generally listen to in no way served to reduce its stunning musical impact (I don’t mind being happy, but I guess I tend to gravitate towards more minor chords in songs). To my predictable liking, there is a fine mix of atypical musical sounds and samples that provide a wonderful accompaniment to the piano, percussion, and emotional guitars and slowly rise and fall with distorted, but far from harsh, tones. Still, this is a hard mixture to pull off in creating a full album of unique music (let alone a double album), but Nightmare Ending does it incredibly well…an opinion I had even before I was pleasantly surprised to hear Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan as a guest vocalist on the final track.

And, in a very “chocolate meet peanut butter” way, Nightmare Ending served as a wonderful soundtrack to my reading of Yellowcake, greatly highlighting Lanagan’s stunning worlds with its compositions.