WATER & POWER by Greg Boyd...

WATER & POWER by Greg Boyd (Asylum Arts: $7.95). None of the characters in these skewed tales of contemporary America seem able to cope with their lives and sexuality, a problem that reaches a chilling conclusion worthy of David Lynch in “Angel.” “The Gun” inverts O. Henry’s classic “The Gift of the Magi”: Each partner in this marriage is willing to sacrifice the other’s possessions for his own happiness. The stress of divorced life in ‘90s Los Angeles overtaxes the narrator’s rather limited resources in the title story: The simple act of paying a utility bill reduces him to a gibbering catatonic, haunted by visions of extinct animals from the La Brea Tar Pits. Boyd writes with a sardonic black humor that alternately fascinates and repels.