Pedro Ponce’s is the kind of writing that begs a second reading. The first time through Alien Autopsy (Cow Heavy Books, 2010), you might not know quite what to make of all of this: a teacher urging her students to applaud a shitting cow; a man bumping into another, seemingly better version of himself while cruising the aisles of a porn shop; an office worker plagued by a Christmastime Secret Satan (yes, Satan). There are eighteen stories in Alien Autopsy, none of them longer than a couple of pages, and the effect is dizzying. The stories go by so fast that they’re difficult to distinguish from each other, and after finishing the first time I was only able to remember one title—Alien Autopsy itself.

But the brevity of these stories is also their saving grace. It takes little time to read through the entire collection, and so it takes little time to read through it again. I urge a follow-up reading; although the collection is greater than the sum of its parts, a few of those parts really jump out the second time through.

“Creature Feature” for example, in which a boy’s weekly Saturday TV monster movie is always interrupted by a visiting aunt—until one day, while sitting on her lap, he notices his attention drawn to something new. Tracing with his eyes the aunt’s neck, then the V of her blouse, he leans in to a point where “fabric and skin separate[d],” and maneuvers himself enough “to make one breast rise against the slim straps that held it.” The next thing he knows, the boy finds himself back on the floor, and his aunt is clutching her blouse closed. As a clergyman on TV warns against “the monsters among us,” the reader knows that there will be no more lap-sitting.

In “Close Encounter,” a man at a porn shop is confronted by his double, who enters our dimension through the Miscellaneous Fetishes aisle. “We are actually the same person,” the double says, “existing in parallel dimensions that have intersected unexpectedly, as parallel dimension sometimes do, though rarely in the aisles of one’s neighborhood adult emporium.” Instead of a dildo, the double clutches a leather-bound Dickens. “Where I’m from,” he says, “people are … turned on by literature.” The narrator is intimidated by his double’s success—money, wife, kids—but the double complains about these same things. “There’s a lot to be said for keeping things simple,” he says. In other words, the narrator could be surrounded by dozens of alternate selves, but none of them would be open to the possibility of fulfillment.

The first-person narrator of the title story is asked at a dinner party if he has ever been in love. Instead of a direct answer, he launches into an explication of the 1987 film The Harvest, in which an advanced alien race subsisting on brains takes over the earth and learns that by feeding false, computerized feelings of love to their comatose victims, they can increase the endorphin levels of the brains. Nobody responds to the diatribe until the host of the dinner party, checking his watch, says, “I guess some people are better off alone.” “Precisely,” the narrator answers.

Each story in Alien Autopsy has … not a moral, exactly, but a purpose that runs deeper than the surface of the narrative. If you don’t pick up on that purpose the first time through, all the better—it gives you a valid excuse (should you even need one) to read the book again.