THE PRISONER PEAR

An unsuspecting suburban community around Lake Oswego, Ore., finds itself unsettled by illogical events and surrealist mischief in this intriguing, nicely polished debut collection of 12 stories.

Imagine that the moon stays full for 93 consecutive nights and that all natural entities, including the human body, experience accelerated growth and fertility; that’s the premise of the charming “Moon Over Water.” The narrator, a mathematics professor at a community college in western Oregon, is determined to wait out this statistically impossible natural phenomenon. Meanwhile, his students steadily drop out of class to move east (where the moon still cycles), and his own wife and children, growing obese, take off for a relative’s home in Denver. Rather than give in to hysteria, however, the narrator drives along the lake to enjoy the wonderful sight of the moon hovering “by some sort of heavenly puppetry.” Similarly, in “Vital Organs,” wife and mother Holly Martino becomes aware that her kidneys are gradually vanishing, to the perplexity of the medical community. In another marvelous story, “Rich Girls,” a working-class husband and father undergoes a series of increasingly ghastly lab experiments for money; he will do literally anything to give his wife and daughters a more comfortable lifestyle. Equally thrilling is the title piece, in which a young UPS manager vacillates about asking his wealthy girlfriend to marry him, until he interprets several bizarre signs that indicate what he should do. Rust adds to the overall sense of absurdity by introducing each tale with a snippet from a local police blotter.

Thoughtful, surprising fiction.