If you fancy yourself an old soul, someone born several centuries too late, and you are of a dark and rainy disposition, Daniel Mills' debut collection is likely to be your bag, and it should fit as snugly on you as the hangman's rope from the creaking gibbet. Mills transports us back to a time when America was still in its infancy and all the woods bordering New England were pregnant with infernal strangers and shadows that bore physical weight. He writes in the refined style and manner of all the old, dead masters, and he does it so wholly and so thoroughly that you might be convinced that this isn't some homage published three short years ago but a dusty, mold-eaten omnibus of fevered confessions and whispered prayers from the long-ago days of Puritans and putrefaction. His talent is best exemplified in strange and quietly unsettling tales like "John Blake," "MS Found in a Chicago Hotel Room," and "The Wayside Voices," but for this reader the pinnacle of his form comes through in "Whistlers' Gore," a tale told entirely through the cryptic epigraphs chiseled on the faces of gravestones in a crumbling cemetery. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of reading this book: walking among the bones of the dead, leaning close, and hearing what they have to say. ( )