Book excerpt: Dark, unnerving, and wickedly funny, Patrick McGrath’s acclaimed short stories deal in the bizarre, the erotic, and the unexpected. A failed writer meets an ageing gin-queen who claims he was once visited by an angel; a little girl finds a delirious, dying explorer from the Congo at the bottom of her back garden; a nightclub is terrorized by a strange libidinous hand; and a young Victorian lady sails to India to find her fiancé Cecil horribly transformed...