Sometimes it’s worth bringing up the old saw about books and their covers: when it comes to clever games with expectations, there could hardly be a better choice of artist for this new anthology than Rodney Smith, whose work previously graced the late Nigel Cox’s Tarzan Presley and James McNaughton’s Star Sailors.

Smith’s cover for Monsters in the Garden is a cheerful riot of pulp fantasy and sci-fi with both local and imported ingredients – and it’s pitch perfect for a collection that doesn’t spare a moment for the idea of literary fiction, dismissed breezily by Larsen in his introduction as, “a brand recognition term posing as a synonym for ‘good’”.

Larsen and co-editor Elizabeth Knox have avoided that chimera by defining Monsters in the Garden’s stomping ground as interesting departures from realism. Although Larsen jokes this has denied him the fun of tormenting the term ‘literary’ and its adherents, it’s obvious that this was the right way to go: it’s afforded a multiverse of possibilities for New Zealand writing that diverges from the world as we know it. Monsters in the Garden respects and polices no genre lines – it includes short stories and excerpts that spill the bounds of familiar categories like science fiction or fantasy or, in a couple of interesting cases, pre-date those boundaries entirely, while others run simply on the unconventional, impossible or uncanny.

This is New Zealand’s own literary Wood Between The Worlds, with added birdsong and a touch of sea air, an irresistible gateway to all sorts of unexpected places.

That opens up the field to numerous beloved local writers who’ve been, as Terry Pratchett once said, accused of literature – probably foremost among them Janet Frame, whose Two Sheep is introduced by Knox as, “a parable, a dark comedy and lethally sad”. It’s all of those things and also close to meriting the collection’s asking price within six pages. Yet elsewhere we also get Keri Hulme’s jangly, raw Kaibatsu-san in which scaly street punks in a futuristic Christchurch wager more than they’d planned; a sampling from Maurice Gee’s much-loved The Halfmen of O; Owen Marshall on immortality and the social contract; Philip Mann’s pop culture fever dream The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse and Misrule in Diamond drawn from a tantalisingly incomplete fantasy novel by Margaret Mahy.

Ghost stories are a recurring theme, my pick of the bunch being Craig Gamble’s The Rule of Twelfths, a truly eerie coastal idyll played out in broad daylight. Other spirits on the move here are curious, innocent or ambivalent – but as seen in Karen Healey’s space opera Where We Walk, We Walk On Bones, they’re always with us. There’s a gleeful dark edge to some of the fantasy writing here too, including Dylan Horrocks’ depiction of a magic duel as elaborate gothic bloodsport, and James Barrowman’s The Sharkskin, which rolls together Draculesque carnage and high sorcery through the eyes of a thoroughly mortal sea-captain with a war to fight. Both are ferocious good fun.

There’s plenty of engagement with real-life issues in the way that only a non-realistic setting allows: male dominance and its consequences (Pip Adam’s A Problem and Tamsyn Muir’s Union), exclusion and objectification in the midst of plenty (Witi Ihimaera’s The Last White Rhinoceros) or the urgency of dialogue, reciprocity and making amends (Lawrence Patchett’s The Twelfth Meet). And we’re in a good historical moment to appreciate a dragon-slaying that triggers a much deeper social and moral reckoning (Jack Larsen’s Ash Child). At the same time, however, once you’ve started dipping into this kaleidoscopic collection, spot-checks for social relevance rapidly become the last thing on your mind – this is New Zealand’s own literary Wood Between The Worlds, with added birdsong and a touch of sea air, an irresistible gateway to all sorts of unexpected places.

Reviewed by Samuel Finnemore