Short stories that enthrall, impress

Steve ALMOND soared into bestsellerdom last year as the ebulliently gifted author of “Candyfreak,” a hilarious personal odyssey into the workings of smaller sweets manufacturers around the country. His new, third opus, “The Evil B.B. Chow,” declares an enduring commitment to fiction. Like his first book, “My Life in Heavy Metal,” this latest is a collection of short stories: deceptively light, hip slices of life oozing so much instant gratification that it’s hard to resist gulping them all down in one greedy session. Even the title charms with a sort of drugstore-of-yore nostalgia, hearkening back to a pre-enlightenment age of hero comics featuring creepy Asian bad guys. (“He sounds like the villain in a Bruce Lee picture,” one character declares.)

Of these 12 stories, all but one take place in the middle-class, all-American here-and-now. Six are told in the first person, and all are wrapped tightly, classically, around the plight of the central character -- usually a twenty- or thirtysomething man or woman whose dilemma, at first dim in outline, develops and dawns as gradually on the protagonist as on the reader. John Cheever territory, one might say. And Almond shares with Cheever, that master of the short form, a knack for ventriloquism, for merging the reader’s consciousness with his character’s roiled state of mind from the first page onward.

Try this opening image from “Wired for Life”: “Janie met the electrician Charlie Song in August. The AC adapter to her laptop had frayed and the connection kept failing. Thus she was forced to jiggle the plug until the current returned, at which point she would have to remain very still for many minutes at a time -- she worked with the laptop on her actual lap, which was ridiculous, pathetic, but there you have it....”

In addition to the virtual discomfort these lines engender, they illustrate some other signature Almond traits. The uncluttered, “as spoken” style, for example. Also, his evident sympathy for his beleaguered characters, whom he can’t help but advocate for rather than judge, even when in panic or blindness they commit the apparently indefensible: kill an unpopular playmate, say, or leave a dying lover, or perform a sex act weird beyond disgusting, or simply lie to a pal for money. As for the hapless Janie, all sorts of connections turn out to be failing, not least the physical current to her boyfriend of unearthly beauty, Drew: “[H]is shoulder had gone dead under her touch and now he was flashing her his adorable sulky underlip and asking: Can’t we just cuddle? Please, baby. Don’t give up on me. I’ll get it back.” Almond doesn’t merely describe, he inhabits Janie’s obsession, her wistful humor, her humiliation. The lone-female experience is utterly convincing. The same kind of transubstantiation takes place in the title story, in which an older and putatively tougher working woman, creative director of the magazine “Woman’s Work,” cracks wise (“the whole dual-fork scenario spooks him. I seem to be a slob magnet,” and “he’s one of those men who conducts his love life like a catch-and-release program”) while the cracks in her heart run toward the breaking point.

Not every story packs the salty-sweet punch of these two. “Appropriate Sex” deals rather predictably with that over-analyzed topic, while a piece dealing with a certain portion of Michael Jackson’s anatomy (another satire on life in academic circles) remains an essay, however irreverent. And a few shorter pieces, such as “The Problem of Human Consumption,” feel underdeveloped, with a concluding sentiment imposed rather than earned.

Like a star among planets, the tour-de-force titled “Lincoln, Arisen,” outshines all its companions. Is this a story, exactly? Call it an exploration and imagining, in scenes and fragments, of an intimate, boundary-crossing relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The language is sinewy and fresh, completely alive. Along with some indelible, beautiful images, “Lincoln, Arisen” leaves more questions than answers, and yet, paradoxically, it satisfies.

One hopes for more in this vein from Almond, whose last story here concludes with the promising words, “ ‘Of course’, I said. ‘Why would I stop?’ ”

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”