In the title story, a young man waiting in the Hotel Eden discovers–as others have–that Eden is not a permanent domicile. In Zanduce at Second, a baseball player turned killer-by-accident undergoes a surprising transformation. We root for escaped felon Ray ( A Note on the Type ) as he carves his name on a culvert wall. We drive the sweltering summer streets of Phoenix as a nineteen-year-old narrator goes through an unsettling sexual awakening (Oxygen). In these and other stories, whether his characters are getting sabotaged by nightcaps or encountering nudists on a rafting trip, Carlson takes us to new places in a new way.