sillier than his radio personatrying to break the world’s sleep-deprivation record. When he sets a new record, he cannot understand that the quest was only hype and, like Franz Kafka’s hunger artist, wants to keep going. The biggest believer in hype, however, is Jackson Peters Reilly, a divorced snowbird who, in “Jubilation,” buys property in an expensive central Florida housing development allied with a theme park. To market itself, the housing development draws on typical theme-park fantasies, using cartoon characters such as Gulpy Gator and Chowchy and giving its home models names such as Casual Contempos, Little Adobes, and Courteous Coastals. Jackson not only adopts the development’s terminology but soon is trying to enforce its code restrictions on his neighbors. Reality, nonetheless, has a way of asserting itself, here in the form of mosquitoes, hurricanes, and other hazards of nature.

Still another group of stories centers on young men who are even dumber and hence dangerous to themselves and others. In the final story, “Up Against the Wall,” recent college graduate John Gaddis moves back in with his parents (always a comedown). He finally finds a job in a miserable ghetto school teaching eighth-grade English but, to forget his daily battle, also gets involved with drugs and a bad crowd. When his mother saves him by confronting him with incriminating tape recordings, he feels trapped like his father, his life over. He could have ended up like Raymond, the homeless young man in “Here Comes” who is a slave to alcohol, who sees his homeless friends brutally murdered, and who crawls back to beg his disgusted girlfriend, who threw him out, to take him in again.

Another problem with these young men is that they are out to prove themselves and impress people, especially young women. In “All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of,” which begins with the line “All I wanted, really, was to attain mythic status,” young Lester brags throughout about his “wrecks both literal and figurative, replete with flames, blood, crushed metal and broken hearts, a whole swath of destruction and self-immolation, my own personal skid marks etched into the road of my life and maybe yours too.”

In “The Swift Passage of the Animals,” young Zach sets off for a weekend getaway at a mountain lodge with Ontario, a young divorcé he met three weeks before. Zach, who fancies himself a risk-taker, decides to impress her by taking a winding back road during a blizzard. Unfortunately, he proves to be like one of those animals on which Ontario is an expert, who became extinct through their stupidity. For the survival of the species, she gets a separate room at the lodge.

Animal behavior is also the focus of the collection’s title story, “Tooth and Claw.” Again, the story begins in a bar, where James “Junior” Turner, to impress the onlookers and especially Daria the waitress, is drawn into a game of Horse for a wild cat, an African serval. He wins, to the delight of Daria, who accompanies him home. “So,” he thinks proudly, “I had a cat. And a girl.” The phrasing has an ominous symbolic equivalence that reverberates through the rest of the story. What the wild cat does to his bedroom, where they turn it loose, is pretty much what Daria does to him. He begins to think of her as “a prime mover” in his life, but she spends only a couple of nights with him, announces that she has a regular boyfriend away at college, and says goodbye. He is left with a ripped-up bedroom and a raging wild creature with whichat the story’s endhe comes to identify and tries to set free.

Animals play an important role in still other stories from the collection. Besides the ornithologist who is for the birds, a woman in “Dogology” is going to the dogs and entices a married neighbor, fittingly named Julian Fox, to accompany her. She is a graduate student whose thesis has been rejected by her committee, and she is determined to show them up with a groundbreaking study of dogs from the dogs’ perspective, running with the pack on all fours, howling at the moon, and helping protect the den. In separate sections of the story, her behavior is paralleled with that of wolf children from 1920’s India. Like Boyle’s epigraph from Charles Darwin and his title Tooth and Claw, the connections between humans and animals in these stories point to an underlying Darwinian nature of existence.

The ultimate Darwinian scenario is played out in “Chicxulub,” which describes the extinction of dinosaurs caused by an asteroid or comet striking the earth. This earth-shaking event is used in the story as a metaphor for parental loss of a child, but the literal fact that such cosmic events could happen at any time and wipe out civilization is a bit rattling. However, in “Blinded by the Light” Boyle takes a similar premise and uses it to comic effect. Here “the sky is falling” in the form of cancer-causing rays coming through a hole in the ozone layer at the South Pole, or so says American expert John Longworth, Ph.D. He is preaching to Patagonia, Chile, whose proximity to the South Pole puts it in imminent danger. When he messes with the daughter of a Patagonian sheep rancher who comes after him with a gun, the expert temporarily puts his campaign to save the world on hold. Boyle’s ability in these two stories to take a similar premise and argue it both ways is a measure of how he can stretch his imagination.

These two stories and others in the collection, such as “The Doubtfulness of Water: Madam Knight’s Journey to New York, 1702,” also show that Boyle does his research. The factual information in the stories, such as the big words Boyle sometimes slips in, rings true. His ability to insert himself and his readers into his settings, however remote, and to participate in the lives of his characters, however bizarre, shows that he can take almost any factual information and run with it the way a writer of fiction should.