No Further Messages assembles 20 of Brett Alexander Savory’s stories – most of which were published over the last nine years, three of them original to this collection. Two of those original stories – the noir/horror “Scenario B” and the Harlan Ellisonesque “Marching the Hate Machines into the Sun” – along with the previously published opening story, “Messages,” are the best of the collection. In contrast to the older material, these three stories suggest an author coming into his own.

“Messages” is a game of cat and mouse played by “God, The Devil, or something else entirely,” where human pawns channel non-human messages that have the power to alter destiny. Heady metaphysical stuff, but only in summary – Savory roots his stories in strange but ultimately credible realities. The story is told through a handful of mostly criminal types, whose pursuit of everyday violence goes a long way to justifying their ultimate fates.

More judicious editing would have done the book a great service. Over two-thirds of the stories involve writers and/or writing, and of the remainder, a great number are concerned with a character’s misguided creativity. It all gets a little too meta over the course of 20 stories. Add to this a fondness for the first-person narrative point of view (the curious but ultimately unsatisfying “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event” uses two of them), and a perhaps unintended tone of self-indulgence creeps in. Also, greater consideration could have been given to order and selection.

Still, an original voice earns extra patience. At his most effective – whether channelling a depressed, possibly possessed father publicly demeaning his child in “Slipknot,” or a husband considering whether he will beg a mass murderer to spare his wife in “Hate Machines” – Savory has a great sense of humanity, and makes the reader feel complicit in the horror through empathy and even sympathy.