Satirist, memoirist and novelist Jim Knipfel's short stories are riffs on archetypes and fables, but don't expect to find any women running with wolves or men pounding drums around a North Woods campfire. Readers will find little that is empowering in these wry mash-ups of political correctness, human carnivorousness and urban legends.

Rather than a frog turning into a prince, a typical Knipfel protagonist is a lonely, poor, elderly woman on the verge of dementia. In Knipfel's world, the overeducated are punished for pride while the simple-minded reap the rewards of their own making.

"World Without End, Amen" provides a helpful lens through which to view these assorted tales of false senses of entitlement, ill-advised acceptance of face value and deluded allegiance to self-governing principles. A Chaucer's "Prologue" reimagined by way of R. Crumb, this preface describes a universe created by an indolent Satan who added humans in search of creatures fallible enough to "remain unpredictable, whose entertainment value would not diminish with time."

One might expect folly at all levels of society, given such a preface. Indeed, a lying dean, passive mayor, more than one shady ringmaster and a Manhattan princess populate this book.

But like such cultural touchstones as Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, Knipfel focuses on the disenfranchised, including Nick Bogus, the deserted husband of "Plants Ain't No Good," and Grady, an unemployed alcoholic haunted by an invisible monkey in "Misery & Co." In fact, "These Children Who Come at You With Knives" may be the American cousin to Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby."

Disbelief is suspended from the get-go in wickedly funny tales of a bank-robbing horse and a nonconformist chicken. In these fractured fairy tales, a spoiled post-millennial learns manners in a New York twist of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"; an impossible quest to win the hand of a lady reaches an abrupt if satisfying end with the would-be knight telling her off in "The Boy Who Came to His Senses," and a rube responds to a visit from a talking fish by bludgeoning it over the head with a small club in "The Toothpick."

The tests of a true fable are whether the outcome feels inevitable, we recognize our own motivation and it manages, nevertheless, to surprise us.

Knipfel's stories pass all these tests. The main character of "The Gnome Who Would Be King" embodies the value of fables. When he makes an ugly grimace, he summons the worst, buried, personal memory of cruelty in every listener, regardless of station, bringing us all down to the same level.

James Cihlar is the author of the poetry book "Undoing." He lives in St. Paul.