title: Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
author:  Steven Millhauser 
description: Starred Review. Phenomenal clarity and rapacious movement are only two of the virtues of Millhauser's new collection, which focuses on the misery wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition. The citizens who build insulated domes over their houses in The Dome escalate their ambitions to great literal and figurative heights, but the accomplishment becomes bittersweet. The uncontrollably amused adolescents in the book's title story, who gather together for laughing sessions, find something ultimately joyless in their mirth. As in earlier works like <I>The Barnum Museum</I>, Millhauser's tales evolve more like lyrical essays than like stories; the most breathlessly paced sound the most like essays. The painter at the center of A Precursor of the Cinema develops from entirely conventional works to paintings that blend photographic realism with inexplicable movement, to&mdash;something entirely new. Similarly, haute couture dresses grow in A Change in Fashion until the people beneath them disappear, and the socioeconomic tension Millhauser induces is as tight as a corset. Though his exaggerated outlook on contemporary life might seem to be at once uncomfortably clinical and fantastical, Millhauser's stories draw us in all the more powerfully, extending his peculiar domain further than ever. <I>(Feb.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: **Untitled Story**
  
  **by Frank M. Robinson**
  
  _The mayor bought a bottle of “cure-all water”_ — _which was a silly sort of
  gag to fall for. But it_ _wasn’t a gag; it worked. And it was several thousand
  times more dangerous than ever he_ _imagined_...
  
  Illustrated by Schneeman
  
  **An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.**
  
  [**_Notes_**](C:\\Program Files\\ABC Amber Text Converter\\)
  
  “I’m afraid I’ve been a fool,” the man said.
  
  He was a big, rawboned Irishman and looked as solid as the oak desk he sat
  behind. A trace of white ran through his hair but he still didn’t look his
  age.
  
  His kind never do, Hayssen thought. They look like they can handle a hod full
  of bricks up to the day they die.
  
  The man’s name was Flaherty and he had a faintly worried look on his bulldog
  face. He ran a nervous hand through his hair and for a fleeting moment, with
  that gesture and his worried expression, he looked like he was honestly
  pushing the middle sixties.
  
  “I _am_ a fool,” he added.
  
  Hayssen shrugged his capa