Grey Area (1996)

With Grey Area, the smart, technically adroit Will Self has written nine short stories, all with arrestingly bizarre situations taken to their logical — often too logical — conclusions. Time and again, Self takes an interesting idea, gives it a few permutations, and then settles for a flat punchline. Concept is all. But when we can't see the literary machinery working, the results are striking: ''Chest'' is a strangely poignant look at the upper class in a pollution-scarred future; ''Incubus'' eerily details a graduate student's sleeping with her mentor; and the tour de force ''Scale'' charts the disintegrating life of a morphine-addicted man working on a thesis about the M40 highway. For the moment, Self is too talented a writer to ignore, but too clever a stylist by half to fully enjoy.