"The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories" exquisitely conveys the pain of an adolescent outsider. Like Tim Burton's movies, the work manages to be both childlike and sophisticated, blending the innocent with the macabre. In the manner of the pictorial tales of Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey - but from a slightly more twisted realm of the imagination - Burton's creepy stories conjure up the fantastical, even the slightly demented.