The consummate artistry of Dave McKean has permeated popular culture for more than thirty years. His images, at once bizarre, beautiful, and instantly recognizable, have graced an impressive array of books, CDs, graphic novels, and films. In The Weight of Words, ten contemporary storytellers, among them the artist himself, have created a series of varied, compelling narratives, each inspired by one of McKean’s paintings. The result is a collaborative effort in which words and pictures enhance and illuminate each other.

The volume opens with Alastair Reynolds’s “Belladonna Nights,” set in the world of his novel, House of Suns, the portrait of a thousand nights-long “reunion” held in the far reaches of space. Elsewhere in this book are a series of tales featuring doppelgangers, lost souls and lucid dreamers. Highlights include:

• Joe R. Lansdale’s “Robo Rapid,” a near future cautionary tale about Man vs. Machine;
• M. John Harrison’s “Yummie,” in which a middle-aged man experiences the hallucinatory aftermath of a heart attack;
• Joe Hill’s “All I Care About Is You,” the account of a pure, if temporary, friendship;
• Catherynne M. Valente’s “No One Dies in Nowhere,” a tale of death and detection in the afterlife;
• Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Orange Tree,” the story of an 11th century golem that is also a study of loneliness;
• “Monkey and the Lady,” an ironic creation myth by Neil Gaiman;
• “Train of Death,” an abbreviated account of the literal death of literature, also by Neil Gaiman.

The Weight of Words is an anthology where the merger of words and images adds up to a tribute to the artist.