Most of the stories have dark - even macabre - themes. One tells how demons are created in Hell; in another, a man discovers that he has been living his entire life in a computer simulation; still another involves a boy's sexual enslavement by an ultra-rich man.
Some are more fully fleshed out than others, as if Gaiman began a longer novel before giving up; but these are worth including because Gaiman has such a gift for language and knows how to tell a story, even if it is a partial story.
Each story is independent of the others, but some exist in the same universe. For example, the wealthy Mr. Alice and his employee Mr. Smith appear in two different stories.
A couple satires or homages to the writings of other authors - C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes; and a few are inspired by art and music heard by Gaiman.
My favourite entry was the longest and final story in the collection - The Monarch of the Glen, which featured Shadow of American Gods and takes place a couple years after that novel.
Nearly everything in this book has appeared elsewhere and I had already read a few of the stories, but I enjoyed them again this time around.