Oddball characters spin dark tales of human complexity

Unlike a baker’s dozen, which benefits the recipient -- an extra doughnut, say, for every 12 purchased -- Melvin Jules Bukiet’s “A Faker’s Dozen” seems to shortchange his readers: There are only 11 stories in this “dozen.” Yet the extra heaping serving he provides of unbuttoned, oddball characters in bizarre settings is the real bonus, the premium thrown in to make your purchase worthwhile.

Each of Bukiet’s startling tales features characters who are in one way or another outlandish deceivers.

They are out to get something they badly desire -- usually scholarly or literary prestige but occasionally such disturbing things as incestuous relations or recurrent proximity to murder -- and they go about achieving their ambitions in underhanded and intriguing ways. There is a darkness to these stories that adds a delicious complexity, along with the literary in-jokes.

“Squeak, Memory” recounts the adventures of an earnest student of literature, enamored of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who believes he has run into Nabokov on the streets of New York, though no one else recognizes the master. Set in 1973, against the backdrop of Watergate (whose “parade of unreliable narrators told their stories on daytime television”), “Squeak, Memory” has the narrator trail the presumed novelist on a shoe-buying expedition: “ ‘Hey,’ I said to myself, ‘this is a creepy thing to do. This is what G. Gordon Liddy did.’ Then I relaxed and enjoyed my transgression.’ ” Eventually the narrator follows his prey to a less-than-ostentatious hotel and spies on him, inventing stories about the shoes his “Nabokov” has purchased and descending further into Watergate-like transgressions.

In “Paper Hero,” we are treated to a twisted metafictional portrait of the book-publishing industry. Randall, the protagonist, is an aspiring novelist determined to gain attention for his unpublished manuscript, “Strange Fire” (the title of Bukiet’s most recent novel). He dreams up the perfect scheme, a “Rushdie Redux”: “What greater accolade for a book than to be taken seriously enough to kill for? Imagine it. Assassination attempt on previously unknown author at the largest book fair in the universe.” But planning your own assassination attempt turns out to be much harder than you might think. The ornate grand salon of Barkeley’s internationally recognized auction house is the setting of a disturbing tale titled “Splinters.” Offered at the auctioneer’s annual sale of theological items are many rare and valuable religious artifacts: “silver kiddush cups that had belonged to Sigmund Freud, African fetishes ... a sheaf of correspondence between Reinhold Niebuhr and Teilhard de Chardin.” The most priceless is a fragment -- half an inch long by an eighth of an inch wide -- of the True Cross. One mysterious bidder sits in the back of the room, a man for whom an uncapped line of credit has been established. “His name was Mark,” Bukiet tells us, “and so far as he knew he bore no relation to the apostle.”

Mark is a titan of publishing, satellite communications, radio, real estate and railroads, whose Karma Corp. has made him wealthy many times over. Unsure of what to do with all his wealth -- “[t]he only terrain left to conquer was the ineffable, the ethereal, the other” -- Mark has set out to buy unique religious relics, even those about which his dealers are suspicious. But authenticity isn’t the point. Even forgeries, he understands, have “been the subject of faith.... Perhaps it is the faith of the forger if no one else. But wouldn’t Jesus say that the forger’s -- or sinner’s -- faith is more valuable than the saint’s?”

Though undeniably entertaining, some of Bukiet’s stories are so dark or so loaded with literary archetypes as to strain the reader’s credulity. Max, the protagonist of “The War Lovers,” grows obsessed with photographing murder victims and travels the globe in pursuit of this gruesome hobby that gives his life meaning. His girlfriend, who’s put up with his death obsession, changes inexplicably near the end of the tale. “Max had turned his back on death, while Catherine had silently, secretly, pursued him into the dark realm, which now belonged entirely to her,” we’re told, setting up Bukiet’s improbable ending of mechanical rabbits run amok.

In “The Two Franzes,” the Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer steals stories from the boy Franz Kafka; this is taken to be the “real” story that led to Kafka’s writing “The Trial,” “The Metamorphosis” and other tales.

Bukiet’s collection illuminates the world of oddball intelligentsia, where deceit and weirdness are part of the life of the mind.

It is a world whose inhabitants know too much for their own good and yet cannot, with all that knowingness, rise above their yearning and their greed.