Each of the fifteen fictions in False Positive originated as a nationally known newspaper story, which Harold Jaffe has and "treated and " to bring to its prosaic surface a maniacal subtext. The original stories cover the familiar American postmodern high school mass murders; sexual molestations; rock star suicides; internet police; serial killers on the loose. Jaffe enters each published version, and through rearrangement, nuanced rewriting, and strategic interpellations, exposes the host text's latent madness. Thus re-armed, Jaffe's prosthetic creation is released into our culture to do its unsettling work. Jaffe's fictive and "treatment and " of these everyday nightmares is ambitious and startling. He embeds his found story in his own heightened versions, leaving the traces of the original text alongside his own, or insinuates the ghostly presence of journalese within his own deadpan lines. As The San Diego Union has said of Jaffe's earlier fiction, False Positive is more and "exquisite chaos from the master word processor of our generation. and "