A homeless child spends her days peddling newspapers and her nights sleeping in a handmade rat’s nest in the bowels of a city teetering on the brink of industrial and social revolution. A disillusioned soldier dies in battle during the First World War only to be reanimated and forced back into the trenches, a rotting husk of his former self. A serf’s worldview is upended after he witnesses a disturbing magic trick, and he begins to plot the overthrow of his masters.

These are the sorts of characters that lurk at the margins of fantasy worlds: the victims of magical thinking, the casualties of imagination. They are too small, too desperate, and too hopeless to be heroes or villains, but they take center stage in this dark three-story collection.

If life really is a war of all against all, these stories aren’t about the exploits of knights or conquerors, they’re about peasants facing down a cavalry charge with shivs in their socks.