Peter Spielberg created interesting worlds in his stories, but did not do much with them. He takes reality, gives it a minor tweak and allows a new way of life to take over. Unfortunately, the characters in most of his short stories don¡¯t do the world they are in justice.

I enjoyed reading ¡°Apocrypha¡± and ¡°A Happening.¡± In these stories Spielberg takes characters with many human qualities and sets them in their parallel worlds. He manages to show the consequent problems that go along with solving a bigger issue, such as starvation, in a unique and entertaining way.

The majority of the remaining stories were disappointing ¡°Withholding¡± has a dry take on divorce due to financial issues with an abrupt, disappointing, story-book ending. ¡°The Noctambulists¡± has the foolish, annoying Mrs. Draper, who detracts from the story with a larger-than life presence in the pages.

For the most part Spielberg¡¯s prose is simple and easy to follow, and the socio- political undercurrents lend a dark humor to his stories. All in all ¡°The Noctambulists¡± as a whole is an interesting read, however not quite as engaging as one may have hoped.

Peter Spielberg's Noctambulists & Other Fictions is, if nothing else, readable. The contortion of contemporary rhetoric into the absurd paradigms of not to distant futures is, at times, even intriguing. There are even a couple moments of grace within this otherwise uninspired recitation of the uncommon. In "Cry Wolf," Spielberg set aside his penchant for the fantastic and delivers a honest and touching tale of the human drama. However, the back-cover synopsis of would have us believe that within it pages "social mores are recycled . . . [and] gender roles are mere foggy memories." But rather than a dismantling of ideological state apparatuses, we are offered a mere perversion of progressive social thought. Spielberg stretches to extremes such unconscionable cultural ills as environmental conservation ("Trading Down"), efforts to feed the starving ("Apocrypha"), and social responsibility to care for the aged ("Noctambulists"). But to what end? Distopian literature is often a cry a in support of individuality, but Spielberg seems to have forgotten that it is already too late. The individual he is concerned with has always already been lost in the masses.

Spielberg's The Noctambulists and Other Fictions, is a hybrid of story-telling; at times reminiscent of Ray Bradbury and George Orwell, weaving the absurd and eerily realistic to make insightful social and political/ economic commentary; at other times similar to Stephen King's short-story telling; capturing the mundane and granted aspects of human interaction with dark hooks.

Shorts such as "Apocrypha" and the collection's title story, "The Noctambulists," capture the folly of human progression, while other notables, "Cry Wolf" and "The Vanishing" wade, into the darkness of the individual's psyche.

Although the stories range in issues from "(b)ridesharing" and the family dynamic to dwindling stockpiles of foodstuffs and a rising senior citizen population, the stories all share a common origin; an inescapable dream.

Spielberg's style and grace remain consistent throughout all seven reads; dark and humorous. Each piece never fails to capture the short-story ethos of "surprise and inevitability."