“So it was that a happy historical coincidence came to be: sex came into my life after the fall of the Soviet Empire…"Two charged and psychologically intriguing short stories that experiment entertainingly within a contemporary gothic mode. In one, a doctor relates his dark fascination with a patient as things fall apart; in the other a sexual awakening has tragic and transgressive consequences; both, in lucid prose, speak emblematically of shifts or breakdowns of social orders more broadly.