To call The Dodecahedron Paul Glennon’s second “collection” would be a little misleading. Images, phrases, characters, and scenarios recur so frequently over these twelve stories that spotting the skewed correspondences becomes a sort of hallucinatory game for the reader, making this wonderful book less a collection or novel of linked stories than a puzzle – one whose solution remains delightfully out of grasp.

In his afterword, Glennon acknowledges a debt to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, but while the two books share their dodecal structure and certain metafictional preoccupations, The Dodecahedron lacks any overall closure. Each story’s self-containment is undermined by its relation to those that surround it. “In My Father’s Library,” for example, tells us of a boy who eats his vanished father’s most coveted books, fearing their links to his disappearance. This tale of the book-eating boy reappears a few stories later in “Why Are There No Penguins?,” when a marooned Arctic explorer remembers having read it in a friend’s journal. Still later, in “Some Clippings for My Article on Machine Literature,” we meet a computer that hallucinates itself as a human marooned in the Arctic.

Amazingly, The Dodecahedron revels in dozens of such correspondences without ever seeming gimmicky. Credit this to the impressive range of subjects and styles – from encyclopaedia entries on an obscure monastic order to pulpy tales of conspiracy and espionage to the confessions of the world’s last genie – all conveyed with vivid intelligence and a precision that leaves one wondering at the breadth of Glennon’s research. Even in the most surreal pieces, details often feel too authentic to be pure invention.

While it’s difficult not to detect the guiding hand of the author in such an overtly constructed project, Glennon’s presence remains unobtrusive. The characters’ voices guide the tenor of the prose, not vice-versa. So despite wearing its conceptual underpinnings on its sleeve, The Dodecahedron never ceases to be about people: how despite the diversity of our obsessions, convergences prevail among us. One rarely sees a book of such scope and ambition succeed so thrillingly.