Pixel Juice

Fifty short pieces make up this collection by Jeff Noon, ranging from the unsettling to the openly bizarre. Several open in ordinary settings and then drift somewhere odd, as when a woman's wish to grow a pet leads to a shop-bought packet of seed.

Noon draws his material from the fringes of media culture and the underground of music. The forms vary widely: mock product recalls, advertisements for eccentric gadgets, prose built like a dub remix, urban fairy tales, instructions for machines that no longer exist, half-plausible true stories, brief dreamlike sketches and long, word-driven rides.

The volume includes new stories set in the world of the Vurt novels, along with a piece that imagines an off switch for the human body. This revised edition is the first to appear in digital form.