Welcome to Stanley Donwood’s fictional universe: a landscape of dark streets and high-rise concrete, creeping shadows and shifting perspectives; its citizens forever caught between boredom and paranoia, alive to the threat of menacing machines and Aliens from Outer Space. Here disappearances (people, things) are everyday. Relationships are unstable. Nature has turned unnatural. Unsettling dreams segue into waking nightmares.

In Humor, Stanley Donwood reveals himself as a contemporary master of the micro-narrative, riffing on the four humors of the human body – sanguine, phlegm, choler and melancholy – to rummage beneath the veneer of sanity that passes for civilised society. Apocalyptic, funny and hallucinogenic in their intensity, these stories present a series of brief, haunting episodes in a world drained of meaning, sense and consequence.