A collection of short stories centered on the complications of love and the disorientation of grief.

Chehak (It’s Not About the Dog: Stories, 2015, etc.) isn’t cowed by the notion of tackling the most exigent existential issues in this assemblage of 16 tales, all but one previously published, mostly in literary magazines such as The Minnesota Review. Many of them confront the pain of loss. For example, in the first, titular piece, Nessa Lowe, a 60-year-old woman, struggles to get her bearings after her longtime husband abandons her for a younger woman—a fate that’s no less humiliating for being clichéd. Nessa contributes to her own solitude by alienating her other family members, as she’s an ungovernable alcoholic, inclined to mercurial acts of violence. Similarly, in “Helium,” Maudie’s spiritual desolation after the death of her husband reduces her to finding companionship in an artificial boy fashioned from balloons. As is characteristic of Chehak’s writing, the story manages to seamlessly weave despair with morbidly outlandish humor, as characters use the latter as a means to negotiate the former. In “Idiot,” a story that’s less than a page in length, an unnamed protagonist returns to her ex-boyfriend’s place to retrieve a pair of shoes only to hurl them into a lagoon shortly after—an act of self-redemption following a self-betraying submission. The author seems keen on flouting conventions; the story structures aren’t always linear, and many of them feel more like quick, impressionistic portraits of emotional states than they do literary chronicles of events. The concluding piece, “That is This: Resurrection,” resembles narrative verse with its series of short questions and declarative statements: “Is she dead? She is dead.” Chehak’s prose offers an impressive variety of styles, ranging from long, cascading sentences to linguistic parsimony, from short snapshots to longer, more plot-driven narratives. She has a talent for packing a lifetime of retrospection into one or two sentences, such as these, from “Coxswain”: “We ran through the streets, chanting for justice and an end to the war and peace on earth and love and he held my hand and I threw the rock that smashed the sign. There was darkness then and he kissed me then, he shattered me like glass.” Most of the pieces in this book are driven by character, and even the unnamed figures in them are powerfully drawn, if enigmatic. In “Suffer the Children: Four Quartets,” for instance, readers don’t know much information about Ellen—a woman in search of a new home, away from her mother—or about Mrs. Norton, the grifter posing as a house seller, but the mad desperation of both women is palpable. The author also sensitively juxtaposes personal anxiety with its global iteration; in “Apocalypse, Tonight,” the unnamed protagonist—her anonymity conspicuous in a story brimming with named characters—makes elaborate preparations for a New Year’s Eve party that could possibly include a Y2K catastrophe, but lurking in the background is the impending death of her father.

A poignant assortment of stylistically daring stories.

Chehak (What Happened To Paula: The Anatomy of a True Crime, 2014, etc.) returns to fiction with a collection of short stories.

A woman hosts her free-spirit sister, who has returned home to deal with a family crisis. Another copes with her husband’s violent death while his mistress, who witnessed it, collects all the sympathy. A husband and wife, both on their second marriage, confront what makes them need to be with someone. In these 17 stories, Chehak delivers a passel of perspectives from the wiser sides of love and death. Her protagonists are largely in the second half of life; they have reached maturity and yet they are no less hungry for understanding. Generally, they do not react to specific problems in their lives but rather to the aggregate problem of life itself. A wonderful sensation of numbness pervades the stories: Readers don’t witness events so much as sift through memories of them. It is not that Chehak’s characters are unreliable; they simply aren’t interested in feeding the reader a straight account. It’s a haunted world of incidental music half heard or imagined, of tragedies witnessed from a distance or not at all. Characters tread through their realistic, complicated inner lives with a fatalistic sense of humor. The prose is a delight of turned-in logic and vernacular philosophy, allowing the occasional halting statement of bleak brilliance. Never predictable, the narratives twist to unforeseen ends: Characters prove to be not as petty (or far more petty) as previously believed. There is an emotional truth to their lives that readers might like to reject but can’t. Despite all the ways men and women dress themselves up, in houses and marriages and careers and middle age, they can’t help but remain self-preserving beasts at heart. The turns these stories take, structurally and emotionally, prove that Chehak is not only a daring literary artisan, but a connoisseur of human frailty.

An acerbic, stirring collection from a master of the craft.

A thriller that hoards most of its power for the last chapter and even then is not a happy or attractive reading experience. Chehak wrote 1993’s Dancing on Glass, among others, and here again (like in some Faulkner) one spends a lot of time peering through the murk of excess and outsize words, trying to grasp what’s happened—and why. Rafe Ramsay is surely insane, or at least psycho. We first meet him in Monarch, Oregon, where he kills the foster parents of four-year-old Joliet Anne Ray; kidnaps the girl, and returns to his home in Rampage, Iowa. Then that story fades and the focus switches to the return of Madlen Cramer and her own two children from Los Angeles to her family home in Rampage, where she—ll live with her widower father, Deem Malek, whose wife, Grinnell, killed herself after cuckolding Deem and taking up loose living and barn dancing with almost anyone who asked her. Deem has now married the much younger Ruth, who’s about to deliver their first child. Meanwhile, we also learn that Madlen’s late husband, Haven, with whom she grew up—and with whom she and Rafe swore a blood pact—had lost interest in Madlen, acquired a mistress and a second apartment, and was then killed in a blazing auto accident. We discover, too, that Madlen’s daughter Claire had seen Rafe hanging around the vicinity of their Los Angeles apartment, and—what’s more—that jealous Rafe may have had something to do with Haven’s death. He certainly had a lot to do with the death of Grinnell’s lover, Jack Daggett, whom Rafe had beaten when Jack collapsed from a stroke. After all, Jack had thrown Rafe out of a hayloft when Rafe found Jack making love to Grinnell. And so on, and so on. Pages and pages of fine observation fatally delay any possible whiff of suspense.(Author tour)

A murky, ingrown tale of violence and homosexual attraction by the author of The Story of Annie D. (1989) and Harmony (1990). The story opens with Katherine Von Vechten floating prettily to her death, in 1968, having crashed through a skylight of the country club in Cedar Hill, Iowa, and then it jumps forward 25 years as Katherine's husband Bader returns to Cedar Hill, having learned of the death of Roy Kimbel. Roy who? (Chehak's latest is nothing if not confusing.) Very slowly, it emerges that the two key years are 1919 and 1968. In 1919, a rift occurred between the town's leading families when 15-year-old Wolfgang Von Vechten, disapproving of his mother's remarriage to her dead husband's business partner Horace Craig, shot old Craig to death and then hanged himself. The surviving Craig sent the surviving Van Vechtens packing. Forward to 1968. Wolfgang's nephew Bader, both his parents dead in a car crash, shows up in Cedar Hill, a presentable college graduate. Has he come to practice law, sell real estate? Fat chance. Bader's mission is to write a book about Wolfgang's crime, but he's distracted by the delectable Katherine Craig, whom he marries in short order, though her charms have already paled beside those of 15-year-old Lee Kimbel, son of Bader's blue-collar neighbor Roy. (Curiously, the Kimbels, a thoroughly depressing bunch, get far more attention than the Craigs.) It is here that Katherine, suspecting she has a rival, sails through the skylight; soon after, Lee, protecting Bader from Katherine's old man Archie, shoots him with the exact same shotgun Wolfgang used, then kills himself. Before leaving town, Bader confesses his love for Lee to Roy and is beaten to a pulp by the outraged father. ClichÇ-ridden nonsense.