The short story collections of Saranac Lake authors Tyler Barton and Caperton Tissot are very different, and both delightful.

Tyler Barton’s “Eternal Night at the Nature Museum” is filled with wildly imaginative plots and characters. “Once Nothing, Twice Shatter,” introduces a failed disc jockey first person narrator and a used car salesman who stages demolition derbies. That the story line is not literal is clear from the beginning when the narrator tells us, “I crashed into the back of an Integra, transfixed by the riddle of its vanity plate — HEDIE4U.” He sells his damaged Buick to Luther, who shows up at the accident as if by magic.

Burton describes characters quickly and indelibly. About Luther the used car salesman whose demolition derbies are liturgies, he says, “It’s his aura — smile like the grill of a Chrysler, hair a horse’s mane. Luther glowed gold.” The narrator’s mother, who raised bees, “looked like an outer space nun.”

There is something religiously sacrificial in the description of the demolition derbies that Luther hired the narrator to announce for the crowd in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, about the time of the 2008 recession. The references — HEDIE4U, the Civil War, people losing their homes — ricochet throughout the story.

The title story of Tyler Barton’s collection has a sub-title: “A Half-Hour Downriver from Three Mile Island,” where the nuclear disaster occurred. Its ending echoes the Garden of Eden story, “Behind which lies the ladder, and so, the roof. And so, the tree. And so, the fruit.”

Burton’s stories are full of imagination, and I confess to sometimes being unsure of what was literal and what was metaphoric. But all delighted, especially “Spit If You Call It Fear,” an odd story (one character collects dryer lint!) that explores what one owes to a sibling.

Caperton Tissot’s stories are also very imaginative, a bit like “The Twilight Zone,” and as much fun.

In “Mr. Stuart Jones,” the title character hears of his own death over the radio. Of course, he’s surprised to hear he had passed on, but he’s more upset that “It had not been a very flattering description of his life.” The premature news of his death is a wake-up call for Jones that brings him and the reader to an O’Henry ending.

“Move Ahead,” set in Saranac Lake, is an adventure for three classmates at their 25th college class reunion. An automated car wash serves as a time travel/second chance conveyance. “When she and her friends had entered the car wash it was a cloudy February day in the North Country: brutally cold with mountains of snow everywhere. When they came out, it was summer.” Tissot gives us characters who, because of the very unusual car wash, explore a frequent thought: “What if I knew then what I know now.”

“The Other Way” has nine stories that take the reader down unusual paths, Frost’s road “less traveled,” sometimes in locales very familiar to Adirondackers.

Both collections provide good thought and entertainment at this muddy time of year.

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(Disclosure: Tyler Barton is communications manager for the Adirondack Center for Writing; Jerry McGovern serves on the board of ACW.)