There's a doctorate to be written on a certain type of American literary paragraph. Densely packed with hyper-close observation, often containing unindented dialogue, and consuming vast acreage down the page, they seem to be evolving into a tic meant to indicate seriousness. You particularly find them in the work of American men: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody. The last work of fiction I reviewed for these pages, Colson Whitehead's Zone One, was constructed of almost nothing but. This isn't necessarily a complaint  in the right hands, they can be just as thrilling as any other prose  but the danger is that, done badly, they'll suffocate the life out of both you and the story you're reading.

Pulitzer prize-winner Steven Millhauser's We Others contains stories both new and from collections spanning the last 30 years, and he, too, likes his mammoth, intensely wrought paragraphs. Does he get away with it? Sometimes, and when he does, the results can be beguiling.

"The Invasion from Outer Space", for example, is a brilliant, first-person-plural tale of the most disappointing alien invasion possible. Everyone's very excited about it  "we knew just what to do, for hadn't we all seen it a hundred times?"  but the invaders turn out to be just a yellow dust that does nothing but replicate itself. "We had wanted blood, crushed bones, howls of agony." But as there's none of that, no one can think of what to do except watch as it slowly, peacefully takes over.

There's also a sharp batch of stories that are Borgesian in their construction and concerns. "The Barnum Museum" describes a vast museum of wonder and half-wonders. Like Borges in "The Library of Babel", Millhauser is ultimately investigating the mystery of fiction itself: "One school of thought maintains that the wonders of the Barnum Museum deliberately invite mechanical explanations that appear satisfactory without quite satisfying." The same is true of "The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad", at once a retelling of Sinbad's voyages, a scholarly inquiry into their origins and a fantasia of Sinbad facing his death. The story, its history, its effects, all wind together in a single, inseparable twine.

Sometimes, though, you wish Millhauser would let some air in. In the title story, a shocked and mournful new ghost haunts a lonely woman called Maureen. They have an almost-courtship of half-sightings and presences felt, but when Maureen's niece moves in, jealousies begin to surface. It's a lovely, melancholy tale of loneliness, but it's undercut by its ponderousness. The narrator is constantly saying things such as, "Let me linger over this for a moment" and "Let me speak for a moment about the nature of our desire". Forty-three pages of this slow density begins to feel like an endurance test.

Better are excursions such as "Cat 'n' Mouse", in which those lengthy, observational paragraphs are put to use on the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry. It's jarring at first, then engrossing, and ultimately delightful. "The Slap" is a tale of unease set in a commuter town where a man starts slapping strangers. The inexplicability of both the attacks and their cessation tears at the community's fibre but then may also strangely bind it back together, perhaps in a better way.

We Others isn't always an easy collection, but Millhauser has an interesting mind and is capable of genuine surprise (just wait until you meet the wife in "A Visit"). A little patient effort in the right places can yield unexpected treasure.

 Patrick Ness's Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking) is published by Walker.