Pier falls

An expedition to Mars goes terribly wrong.
A seaside pier collapses.
A thirty-stone man is confined to his living room.
One woman is abandoned on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.
Another woman is saved from drowning.
Two boys discover a gun in a shoebox.
A group of explorers find a cave of unimaginable size deep in the Amazon jungle.
A man shoots a stranger in the chest on Christmas Eve.

In this first collection of stories by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon demonstrates two things: first that he is a master of the short form (several of the stories have been longlisted for prizes), second that his imagination is even darker than we had thought.