Most of the stories involve time travel in some way. Even those that don't involve some kind of escape from the anxieties of contemporary life, such life mostly being represented by working hard for a living in New York City in the 1950s.

The first story, also the title story, involves a man's accidental discovery of a third level in Grand Central Station, which really only has two levels. The third level exists in time, in the late nineteenth century. Eager to leave today for yesterday, the main character gets some period-appropriate currency and tries to find his way back there. There's a nice little ending to this story.

"Such Interesting Neighbors" tells the same story but from a different point of view. In this case, the present-day setting of the reader is the distant past for people from the future who have made the same decision as the main character from the first story. The future sucks and they move back to our time, permanently.

The third story, "I'm Scared", develops this theme further. Jung, I think, thought that modern anxiety was being experienced on such a large scale, by so many people, made uneasy by the same things, that it was changing consciousness and (I think) causing people to see UFOs and such. In "I'm Scared" this same anxiety is disrupting time itself. So strong is the desire of people to leave their current time, the mid-twentieth century, for an earlier, simpler, romanticized past, that time itself is being damaged and distorted, and thus people and events are slipping forward and backward in time, with results both amusing and disturbing and sometimes deadly.

After that you need a break, and "Cousin Len's Wonderful Adjective Cellar" is an amusing and imaginative trifle about a device that operates like a portable vacuum cleaner for adjectives. Run it over a page and it sucks up all the adjectives. How many it takes depends on how close you hold it to the text. And then you can empty it out and the adjectives will fly away and insert themselves into people's spoken conversations. It's quite a charming story.

After this comes a fairly silly and sappy "boy meets girl" tale, "Something in a Cloud", in which a young man's fantasy of his imminent blind date, and the corresponding young woman's fantasy of same, compete with reality. The fantasy itself manifests as actual clouds above their heads. This is Finney at his most labored and least satisfying. It's a pretty short story but felt long.

After this comes another change of pace, sort of a time travel story, sort of a ghost story, sort of a... well, I don't know, alternate timeline, alternate universe story? In "There Is a Tide…" the main character is up all night in his apartment trying to make an important decision. He sees another man there, apparently the ghost of someone who lived in the same apartment years ago, and who was also struggling with a weighty decision late at night. Except this ghost isn't dead. The man still lives, decades older now, and our protagonist visits him and speaks to him. Or does he?

"Behind the News" is a story somewhat in the It Happened Tomorrow mold, and is maybe like something Fredric Brown could have written. The young owner of a small-town newspaper finds that if he types something up, sets it and prints it in the paper, then it comes true. Within reason. You can't make thigs that would never happen, happen, but you can definitely manipiulate within reason. A neat twist comes at the end when you discover what the young man's father had done with this ability.

"Quit Zoomin' Those Hands Through the Air" is about Union soldiers in the American Civil War who travel into the future to steal and airplane and bring it back to the past to help with the war effort. There are complications.

Most, perhaps all of these stories were written for magazines of a sort that were comsumed voraciously by a large reading public. The form itself gets teased in "A Dash of Spring", in which the fantasty world of magazine stories is set against the realities of their readers. It's much more successful than "Something in a Cloud".

Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket has nothing to do with time travel or fantasy or anything supernatural or out of the ordinary but it might be the masterpiece of this volume. Desperate to retrieve an important work-related document that's been whisked by the wind out of his apartment window, a man goes on a extremely risky expedition out onto his building ledge, risking everything for some scribbles on a piece of paper. Finney's writing and pacing here are incredibly effective and powerful and the suspense is almost unbearable.

It's the last story in the book, and a good thing, too, because it's a show-stopper

Gabrielle Bell's July diaries are so good that it's a shame we only get them once a year. Maybe we could lobby her to do another month in addition to July?