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“Good Old Neon,” for example, begins as a painfully detailed confession of one man’s route to suicide. Wallace is nothing if not fearlessly ecumenical in his literary tastes and influences, at times blending elements of science fiction and fantasy with a kind of micromanaged naturalism. The ending delivers a double whammy that will have enterprising readers going back over the narrative and trying to follow the breadcrumb trail of bizarre clues. Visits to an unsympathetic psychiatrist and a high-tech sleep clinic succeed merely in compounding Napier’s frustration.

His brain-fried daytime hours are given over to aural and visual hallucinations (“sometimes, for instance, trying to shave in the mirror, my visage will appear to have an extra eye in the center of my forehead…”). Embroiled in a dispute with his wife over the issue of his nighttime snoring, Napier no longer can sleep at all. The title piece is an increasingly desperate first-person account of the sleep-deprived meltdown of Randall Napier, an assistant systems supervisor for a company called Advanced Data Capture. Several of the stories in Oblivion are tours de force of cognition gone awry. No other contemporary American author has so painstakingly—and hilariously—mapped the incessant dysfunctional chatter that streams through our heads and masquerades as rational thought. It’s a motto suitable for much of Wallace’s work. In the story “The Suffering Channel,” a corporation with the motto “consciousness is nature’s nightmare” plans to launch a cable channel devoted to human misery. The characters and the locale are never named, thus allowing readers to distance themselves from the horrific scene while at the same time pondering the eternal verities of familial tragedy. The child’s screams, we’re told, “were regular as breath and went on so long they’d become already a thing in the kitchen.” As the title suggests, Wallace imbues the story with a mythic universality.

A masterpiece of heart-stopping brevity, “Incarnations of Burned Children” concerns the frantic efforts of a mother and father to console their infant son who has been severely scalded from an overturned pot of boiling water on the stove. And yet, one of the most memorable pieces is only three pages in length. Six of the eight stories here are long and intricate examples of the author’s labyrinthine tale spinning. Consistently impressive is his much-admired talent for bringing a plaintive three-dimensionality to the inner lives of his characters.

Without sacrificing his flair for brainy surreal prose and dead-on social satire—which have on occasion seemed like ends in themselves—Wallace has added a stronger than usual emphasis on narrative drive and ingenious plotting. Oblivion is David Foster Wallace’s third and best collection of short stories to date.