At first the reader doesn't like the stories. No, the reader doesn't like the narrator. The narrative doubles in and out, a Choose Your Own Adventure by schizophrenics, guided by an unreliable narrator. It's not even that this narrator might be a liar to the reader and to himself. Rather, he refuses to sign the contract between reader and writer, where the writer promises to make things clear and flashes back appropriately, and delivers the epiphany at the end, all the snow swirling around and such.
Sleep works on a different logic.
It gives the reader a headache. Like a Hal Hartley movie, the characters deliver their lines unconvincingly, but in a somehow compelling way. Sleep dreams up bank robbers, old men and streakers, dead bodies, cheap knives, broken elevators. All say something and then take it back. The stories in Fetish Lives concern such historical figures as Eleanor Marx, Mata Hari, and Walt Whitman.