Vivid Visions, a collection of surreal romantic tales by Seyed Mosayeb Alam, may target teenage girls caught in the angst of their youthful dreams and expectations. These stories resonate with the wistful nostalgia of unrequited love and faded opportunities. However, what might have been subsumed by adolescent sentimentality and made maudlin is redeemed mainly by the supernatural edge that limns each story with an eerie, luminous glow of proximate otherworldliness — usually the one just beyond our own. Despite the risk of too much saccharine, this paranormal presence continually embitters each tale with the macabre, malevolent, or malicious taste of death. In a manner of speaking, each short story begs the question: “Are we being punished for our love?”

Other than the characters’ names and story plots being too often repeated, which causes some fatigue from lack of novelty, this book is again redeemed by the quality of the writing. One is inclined to give the author the “benefit of the doubt” by presuming this repetition is meant to emphasize a theme rather than denote any lack of creative innovation. More generously, one presupposes he is merely “riffing on a melody” like any good jazz musician, and once again, the writing quality supports this notion. Each story is competently and engagingly told, holding the reader’s avid interest from start to finish, and is indeed complete unto itself. Despite my complete lack of affiliation with or understanding of teenage girls, I have no complaints. The preternatural elements fully compensated for my deficiency.