Author Kevin Brockmeier seems entirely undecided on a genre — his work is perpetually shifting from sci-fi to fairy tale to literary fiction to magical realism. His latest, "The View from the Seventh Layer," a short story collection, is no different — it includes fables, supernatural themes and even a choose-your-own-adventure story. If "Seventh Layer" is any indication, Brockmeier is decidedly undecided.

Released in paperback this month (Vintage; $15), "Seventh Layer" is a testament to Brockmeier’s imaginative range. The title story, like much of the collection, sets up a realistic situation destabilized by a single oddity. Olivia, a lonely islander, works at a tourist-map stand and contemplates her isolated life, a likely situation if she had not once been abducted — so she believes — by an alien from “the seventh layer of space.”

Although Brockmeier’s stories are often outlandish in plot, his prose is lyrical and polished, setting his work apart from dime-store sci-fi and fantasy.

A former student and instructor at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Brockmeier is the author of three other books, which all contain similarly fantastic premises. His 2006 novel "The Brief History of the Dead," for example, describes an afterlife known as the City, in which individuals only exist as long as people on Earth remember them.

While "The Brief History of the Dead" was well-received and even excerpted in The New Yorker, the short fiction of "Seventh Layer" seems a better fit for Brockmeier’s tireless imagination.

Mimicking the once-popular “Choose Your Own Adventure” game books, “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story,” allows readers to call the shots — and recall the shots — making their character stay home, go for a walk, eat at McDonald’s or whatever else they choose.

“Home Videos,” perhaps the collection’s most entertaining piece, portrays an associate producer at America’s Funniest Home Videos who spends his days watching footage of “thousands upon thousands of cute animals and hammy little kids.” This tedium is, however, disrupted when a mysterious woman begins sending truly funny — and wildly inappropriate — videos to the show.

Although each of the 13 stories in "Seventh Layer" is inventive and amusing, many are left unresolved while others come to hurried and unsatisfying conclusions. In “Andrea is Changing Her Name,” a story about a man’s lifelong obsession with a high-school classmate, the narrator even admits this apparent fault: “There is no form to this story because it is true, or at least as close to true as I have been able to make it.”

Of course, this shortcoming may be intentional, a way for Brockmeier to further demonstrate his displeasure with traditional fiction. "The View from the Seventh Layer" is in every way eccentric, but also consistently artful and entertaining.

Reach reporter Joe Darda at arts@dailyuw.com.