The Adventurists — Richard Butner

"Flawless. . . . Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she's become
the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There's the historic house,
where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An
ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your
co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel
under your old high school, and couldn't resist going to see where it
led.

Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes
into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half
hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them.
You might want to get out of the way.

Butner's allusive and
elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life -- where there are
no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a
tree might talk to just one person, where Death's Fool is not to be
ignored.