It's good to find them making the trip out of Australia. Dowling's own stories seem to fall into the same genre as Ellison's - at the intersection of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Most of Dowling's stories are set in the present or near future. That Grows in the Gun', teleological causality acts to bring an academic conflict to a violent end, and in many of the others the internal mental state of the main character shapes the world in which they live. Unlike Ellison who often depicts a monstrous world spawning monstrous gods and impinging on the spiritual, Dowling's worlds are idea driven, often solipsistic.
Emotion is generated internally rather than from the interaction of characters.
Sometimes a lone character's strange beliefs are shown truer than the common sense of the people around him, or even triumph over physical reality. There are moments of great intensity here and the ghosts of these stories will continue to haunt the reader long after they've put the book down. But there are problems. The cover is particularly uninspiring. Much worse than that, the stories have been bound together by an overall linking narative, much as is done in portmanteau movies.