It’s not often that a short story collection makes you want to reread William Blake, but Michael Bryson’s Only a Lower Paradise does just that. While Blake presides over the entire work, it is in the longer title story that Bryson’s imaginative use of the great poet’s work reaps high dividends.

“Only a Lower Paradise” follows a confused man who discovers that his guardian angel may have lost her angel status because of a conspiracy by the Archangel Gabriel and the Holy Ghost to overthrow God. Bryson’s story reworks William Blake’s four-part cosmology – with figures representing Reason, Imagination, Emotion, and Desire – and sets it in a near future where supernatural beings can interrupt television broadcasts and impersonate American presidents. Bryson’s protagonist is pulled along with the cosmic coup attempt while higher beings joust in a world that is just beyond the hero’s – and the reader’s – comprehension.

Bryson is working with some big, sweeping themes here, and the risk is that his allegories will wax artificial and contrived. He solves this problem with wacky humour – his representative of Emotion is in love with kitchen appliances, Jesus and Lucifer are in cahoots, and the climax of the story occurs at “a fake Elizabethan pub with artificial thatch and a plastic door-knocker.” Blake’s cosmology thus takes the form of a post-modern romp, and the match seems made in Albion.

The other stories, however, read more like prose poems on the themes suggested by the title story. Some, like “Monica & Pete,” are very evocative, despite their brevity; others seem more like sketches for longer works. Throughout, as in the title story, Bryson shows a knack for combining emotional complexity with quirky workaday detail.