Alchemy in Literature

In Multicultural Literature, we have been reading a book entitled The Ghost of John Wayne. It is a somewhat confusing book filled with a bunch of short stories that almost seem to have no ending. It's so confusing, in fact, that I found myself flipping it over to read the back cover and see what others may have thought, or how someone could have described the book in a flattering light when I read the following:

"Ray Gonzalez is a literary alchemist, blending contemporary culture with ancient tradition..."

I was so shocked at finding the one word that we had almost beaten to death the day before, that I had to keep myself from laughing out loud in class. But now that I think about it maybe the stories are an alchemical experiment. All of them take place in modern settings but seem to have a mystical quality that supersedes everything else. As the author of the quote above says Gonzalez is blending the past and the present into something new and original. He has taken what many may consider to be a dead or dying genre and breathed new life into it, transforming stories that have been retold a thousand times into tales that even people of today can appreciate.