Arsenal Pulp Press, 172 pp, $19.95, softcover.

With a title like Hopeful Monsters , you just know you're in for some weird stuff. Remember Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? Or Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands? Scientific monsters or medical miracles? With the short stories in Hopeful Monsters , Burnaby writer Hiromi Goto calls on the theories of actual scientist Richard Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt believed that when it came to evolution, some macromutations, helped along by luck, had a chance of developing "medically beneficial adaptive traits" with which to survive and prosper.

The mirror Goto holds up for us, then, is not one of wrong-headed science but of nature gone wrong. Goto's freaks of nature populate her stories in very real, very vivid, and memorable ways. These human monsters hope to fit in, but how realistic is that? No one can tolerate the title character of "Stinky Girl" because she smells so horrible, despite excellent personal hygiene. The Japanese-Canadian grandchildren of "Camp Americana" turn into cats, literally embodying their otherness. The baby of "Hopeful Monsters", "a commonplace miracle" until born with a tail, stands in for all babies surgically altered because they were not "normal" at birth.

That is the whole point, after all: what is normal and who gets to define it? "I cannot smell myself because I have smelled my scent into normality," Stinky Girl tells us. And a little later, the fine line between ugliness and beauty is exposed. "It may be that I smell beautiful beyond the capacity of human recognition. The scent of angels and salamanders." Miracle or monster? Perspective is everything.

Goto's use of magic realism serves her themes well. Nature and civilized society are at odds in stories where anything, no matter how improbable to scientifically trained minds, can happen, and we believe every word of it. That we do is a testament to Goto's fine writing and confident tone. A couple of the stories, unfortunately placed at the beginning of this collection, are not as successful at combining fully formed characters with strong narrative, but the majority do and do so very well. Hopeful Monsters is like the baby with the tail: weird and marvellous at the same time.

Hiromi Goto launches Hopeful Monsters next Thursday (March 11) at 7 p.m. at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (1399 Johnson Street), Room 405. Admission is free.