HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD

Short stories about troubled men and fathers on the verge.

The debut work of fiction by graphic designer Munday is uniformly focused on middle-aged men sabotaging themselves in service to their appetites and egos. In “Fists,” a man on vacation with his daughter is increasingly frustrated by the lack of appreciation of his hard-earned beach body. “Cabin Pressure” features a recovering alcoholic, who quit drinking after his daughter died, tempted to lapse on a cross-country flight. The cast of characters includes a new father reckoning with his change in status (“New Motion”), an elderly father leaning on his son for help after a stroke (“Dependents”), and a 20-something about to be cut off by his dad (“Sterling”). The book is populated by men who are struggling to make sense of their lives, usually after a marriage has failed; stepchildren, and awkward attempts to connect with them, abound. Divorced, emotionally blinkered manchildren get satirized plenty in popular culture, and Munday isn’t above an absurd premise that reveals a certain patheticness—“Gutter Ball” features a man nursing a cocaine hangover while chaperoning his daughter’s class trip to a bowling alley, overly distracted by her attractive teacher. But even when these men suffer overt humiliations—in “Hide-and-Seek,” a near-broke divorced dad picks up work as a submissive for a dominatrix’s OnlyFans account—Munday affords them a measure of dignity, if not quite forgiveness for their callowness. All of these men have hit an inflection point in their roles as partners and parents, and Munday carefully depicts the tensions that prompt their misguided or desperate acts. The stories together have a structural sameness, and not every story convinces—in “Vandal,” a man absurdly reconnects with his teenage love of graffiti—but Munday has a gift for making the sad dad more than just a trope.

Clear, bittersweet tales of masculinity come undone.