The stories are:
- Snapshot: A teenager has a frightening encounter with a man whose camera is far more than what it appears to be.
- Loaded: A journalist, a jewelry salesman and his spurned lover, and a mall cop with a checkered past intersect in an outburst of violence.
- Aloft: A man's first experience with skydiving ends with him landing on a floating mass of something resembling clouds traveling through the sky.
- Rain: The world is forever changed by rains of crystalline spikes.
Provides examples of:
- Apocalypse Cult: A minor one is operating in Honeysuckle's neighborhood in Rain. They don't appear to be much more than the stereotypical weirdos who wear silvery robes and tin plate hats and who conduct strange ceremonies, but their leader spent time in jail many years prior for abusing his wife and daughters as part of his strange beliefs, and three members try to abduct Honeysuckle so that she can be forcibly converted into their fold.
- Ate His Gun: How Jim Hirst meets his end in Loaded.
- Chekhov's Gun: The typewriter that Templeton writes his stories on in Rain. It's missing a couple of letters, which is how Honeysuckle figures out that his mother used it to write the notes that ultimately led to worldwide devastation.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Aloft: Aubrey's smartphone, like all things electronic, doesn't work while he is on the alien cloud.
- Comic-Book Adaptation: Rain got an adaptation by Image Comics. Some details get omitted to streamline the story, but a major departure is a "Ray of Hope" Ending where Honeysuckle finds research notes on how the needle rain was made and plans to find someone who can use it to figure out how to stop it.
- Downer Ending: Loaded ends with nearly a dozen people dead, including two children (namely a baby when Kellaway shoots the mother, thinking she's a terrorist wearing a bomb vest which was actually a child carrier, and later Kellaway's own son), and the killer confronting the journalist and her daughter on the last page, with the near-certainty that they are going to be killed as well.
- Eagle-Eye Detection: In Rain, Honeysuckle reaches Yolanda's family home in Denver only to find her father lying dead at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. A watch with a broken strap lies among the junk on the floor of Yolanda's bedroom, and Honeysuckle sees a neighbor glancing at his bare wrist (as if to check the time) and his daughter wearing one of Yolanda's bracelets. She quickly figures out that the neighbor had robbed the house, gotten into a fight with Yolanda's father and had his watch ripped off, and pushed him down the stairs.
- Fingore: In Rain, Honeysuckle encounters a prison inmate who's been handcuffed to a tractor. She later finds the tractor wrecked, with no sign of him except a bloody severed thumb, and realizes that someone sawed it off to help him slip out of the cuffs and escape.
- Frameup: The ultimate cause of the worldwide disaster in Rain. Ursula Blake is bitter over the fact that her late husband, a chemical engineer, had his work stolen by his employers and was then fired before they moved overseas to Georgia. She uses his chemicals to seed the clouds and make them rain spikes, then plants evidence to frame Georgian terrorists for the attack and tricks the president of the USA into bombing the country off the map. By the end of the novella, several other countries have blown each other away and civilization has fallen into chaos.
- Genius Loci: The gigantic mass of cloud-like substance that Aubrey lands on in Aloft is the semi-sentient repository for an alien intelligence that has been that has apparently been stranded in Earth's skies for hundreds of years. It responds to Aubrey's desires for shelter and companionship, producing furniture (including a bed) and a kind of replica for his friend Harriet, but the "food" it produces does a horrible number on him and it resists his efforts to figure out exactly what it is.
- Gun Nut: Randall Kellaway and Jim Hirst in Loaded. Kellaway keeps a full-auto Uzi in his car, and Jim spends most of his money on building up his private arsenal, which he gives to Kellaaway after his suicide.
- Haunted Technology: The Solarid camera doesn't contain mechanisms. When Michael finally destroys it, he finds inside a black liquid with an eye in the middle. It communicates with him telepathically and tries to convince him to save it, but he refuses and it dries up and dies, turning into a disk of strange metal.
- Hope Spot: Aloft: Aubrey has two; first when he realizes the jumpmaster that landed on the alien cloud with him but was subsequently dragged off by his parachute had a camera on his helmet and thus filmed the whole thing, meaning he has proof about what happened to Aubrey, and second when he remembers he still has his smartphone in his pocket. For both hope comes crashing down when he realizes the alien cloud disrupts all technology, meaning his phone does not work and the camera most likely wasn't working either. And even if the jumpmaster could convince anyone Aubrey is trapped on a cloud, any helicopter or plane send to get him would stop working and crash the moment it got too close.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In Rain, anyone unlucky enough to get caught in the open during the crystalline rains is turned into a human pincushion or worse. One city is devastated by a rain with spikes the size of carrots, and another receives a rain with spikes described as being like broadswords, killing 3 million people.
- Improvised Parachute: In Aloft, Aubrey eventually gets off the cloud by using the remains of a hot air balloon that got stranded on the cloud 150 years earlier as a makeshift parachute.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Solarid camera rips memories out of people's minds and imprints them on the photos it produces. The "Phoenician" has been using it to essentially mind-wipe anyone who knows of his existence, and Mrs. Beukes' Alzheimer's-like state is the result of him scouring her brain.
- Laser-Guided Karma: At the climax of Snapshot, Michael is able to take the Solarid from the "Phoenician" and gives him a dose of his own medicine, leaving him extremely addled but still functional enough to drive away. He then, eventually, uses the metal the stuff inside the camera dries into as a means of creating super-efficient software for computers and smartphones, so that no one will ever have to forget anything that they don't want to ever again.
- Mercy Kill:
- Near the end of Snapshot, Michael uses the Solarid camera to wipe the last of Mrs. Beukes' memories. With her brain essentially erased, she soon dies.
- In Rain, Honeysuckle encounters a man who has found his cat gravely wounded by the rain, and ends its suffering by breaking its neck.
- Murder by Mistake: In Loaded, Kellaway ends up killing three people by accident, two (one of them being a baby) due to mishearing a witness during the mall shooting, and one due to firing through a door without checking to see who was behind it (he intended to kill his ex-wife and her sister but didn't know his son was standing behind the door when he shot through it).
- Never My Fault: Kellaway is entirely motivated by his refusal to take responsibility for his own actions, and his general selfishness and entitlement.
- A Nuclear Error: In the last chapter of Rain, it's revealed that a combination of worldwide mass hysteria and anger (not helped at all by the President's deranged warmongering) has led to nuclear exchanges breaking out which have devastated entire countries, and also killed the scientists who created the crystalline seed compound, meaning almost everyone who could have come up with a way to stop them is dead.
- Rain of Something Unusual: The premise of Rain — storms begin to rain needle-like spikes of a crystal similar to fulgurite.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: In Rain, Honeysuckle spends most of the story walking from Boulder to Denver to tell her partner's father that she was killed in the first rain, only to find that the father is dead in his home, murdered by his neighbor for having a lesbian daughter.
- Values Dissonance: In-Universe example in Snapshot; the story is set in 1988, but narrated by the now adult protagonist in the present day, so several times he points out these differences between the two eras, like how calling someone a "fag" wasn't as much an issue in 1988 as it is today.
