Like the title suggests, the stories in Wide Eyed unabashedly explore the frontiers of where a midnight state of curiosity and candor can take you. So it’s not unusual to encounter mutant salamanders emerging from bathtub drains, nightly conversations with Mick Jagger, the experience of being picked to the bone and cannibalized by your friends. Throughout, Dalton pollinates and cross-pollinates throwaway observations and images into entirely new complex hybrids, regardless of inbred grotesqueness. It’s like watching the shapes in a kaleidoscope blossom into pattern after pattern without warning.

Again and again, the physicality and behavior of animals and humans recurs as an obsessive theme. Dalton draws toward the barriers that separate humans and other animals, and circumstantially, the barriers that separate life and death, fantasy and reality. In a passage that would make a PETA activist’s blood curdle, she nonchalantly writes, “To be truthful, I can’t wait until my pooch is a foxy red panda-jacket. Sometimes I contemplate where in the house I will place his tanned skin — in the hallway, or maybe in the most classic spot, before the fireplace? I imagine lying on my side, nude, drinking champagne and having sex to Barry White on the earthly remnants of his being.”

The fascination with physicality also extends to the narrator’s own body. In “Sinners,” she recreates a dream she has of her own death: “The air smells dank like rotten Band-Aids, plasticine and poisonous. The killer leads me up to his lair and chops me up. Fingers come off one by one. I lie face down in red, bloody water. My extremities waft off to shore where baby gators can fight over them.” The gruesomeness of the murder is beside the point. The narration pans from her chopped up bits to the hypothetical sea creatures swimming underneath them: “Crabs crawl by. Long eels slither across my peripheral vision. Fish, crawdads, and mosquito larvae hook back and forth, back and forth.”

If there’s anything discomforting about this scenario, it’s Dalton’s easy way of deferring you away from the sensationalist and obvious toward something else entirely. Slowly but surely, you’re coaxed into riding her train of thoughts, winding toward an uncanny, utterly fucked up, and beautiful place. You just have to put up with the goose bumps that arise on your arm.