Experience has endowed him with a range of technical skills, and he puts them to inventive use. He also possesses a number of more particular gifts that were already evident in the grisly though often plangent stories he published in the 1970s. Some of these gifts, such as the ability to locate both menace and pathos in a scenario, have grown with the development of his more workaday skills, so the border between architecture and ornamentation, competence and brilliance, becomes in his work a woozy smudge.