Set in the Uptown neighborhood, “Beneath the Empire of the Birds,” written by former Chicagoan Carl Watson, establishes a Guernican world of the macabre and melancholic. . . . instead of trying to titillate his readers with mere shock tactics, Watson’s work is underlined with a genuine pathological nature. . . . At his recent reading at the Green Mill, Watson’s story “The Future is a Disease,” about the insidiousness of our commercial world, generated much laughter from the audience that I found dismaying. On the page, though, Watson manages to relay that peripheral world where people stumble along the blurred demarcation between sanity and lunacy without romanticizing madness. . . . Like being leeched, reading “Beneath the Empire of the Birds,” is an exhausting experience. It’s as compelling and revolting as a car wreck.”