From Publishers Weekly

Love gets sealed with the sacrifice of a finger, monsters roam high school hallways and invisible dwarves function as angels of death on a city bus: the fantastical intertwines with the quotidian in James Van Pelt's Strangers and Beggars. The 17 stories, divided into four sections (Teaching, Love, Death, Time), contemplate modern dystopias, offering, in the words of Bruce Holland Rogers's introduction, stories of "things gone very wrong" that still manage to feel uplifting not "new maps of hell... [but] new maps out of hell..
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Foreboding stories rarely have upbeat endings, but Van Pelt's do. Edgy and usually creepy, they characteristically let a little light flicker at the end of their dark trajectories because Van Pelt thinks that people can, though they may not, solve their problems. When a teacher is finally caught by the immense spider that no one will remove from her classroom, she begins seeing her new situation as an opening to transcendence. When a businessman of the future doffs the "specs" that keep him perpetually tapped into the markets long enough for a tete-a-tete with his fiancee, he broaches, albeit unawares, the possibility that he can overcome his "infodiction." When Van Pelt re-presents Wells' Time Machine from the point of view of the Eloi girl who becomes attached to the time traveler, he leaves her figuring out how the Eloi can protect themselves from the Morlocks. A refreshingly optimistic bunch of sf-inflected horror tales, all seductive or at least charming, with a futuristic baseball yarn as a delightful comic capper. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Jim Van Pelt's first collection, Strangers and Beggars, was voted one of the Best Books of 2003 by the American Library Association. Now, in this new collection, Van Pelt continues to explore the ever-changing boundaries of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The Last of the O-Forms is an important collection filled with stories that transport us to far-flung worlds and to the harder-to-find inner worlds that define the human condition.

From Booklist

In the stories of Van Pelt's Strangers and Beggars (2002), civilization as we know it may have gone to smash, but for the characters, tomorrow is still another day. Same here. In the title story, a menagerie of mutant animals is losing business because humans are mutating, too, and don't want to be reminded; on the other hand, humans are mutating, too, so . . . In "A Flock of Birds," perhaps 50,000 people remain in the U.S. after a big biowar, but some other creatures are unaffected--and more. The ghost story "Do Good," about a high-school assistant principal nearing retirement, skirts the maudlin to become heartwarming. Three futuristic crime tales, three stories of sports and games to come, a Lovecraft pastiche set in the Old West, a couple of yarns--one sf, the other a ghost story--spun out of classic movies, and three more stories are just as satisfying for their realistically developed milieus and actions as for their surprises and ironies. They're colorful and flavorful, too: terrific stories. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A supple, inventive, and ambitious writer who handles any genre with expert ease -- Gardner Dozois, editor of The Year's Best SF