Gene Wolfe - Innocents Abroad

I remember that series of Wolfe's that I read a while back was good, and that plus the neat cover illustration (I later discovered that it's a Magritte - figures) was enough to get me to borrow this collection of his short stories. The inside of the dust jacket contains some rapturous praise from the Washington Post Book World, comparing him to Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges and Nabokov, before going on to nod at H G Wells, Jack Vance, H P Lovecraft and Damon Knight (who?), and I can see where this kind of enthusiasm comes from, even if I don't share it in full measure. Wolfe's a wonderfully intelligent craftsman of genre fiction - his stories start in unexpected places and twist even further away from what one would expect, but they're always true to themselves and always (perhaps like all the best fantasy and horror writing) seem like diffracted reflections of the familiar.