A keen voice, profound insight

“I am in The Contraption. My eyes, which the doctor has dilated, are pinned open.”

“I’m in a sex shop in San Francisco watching my father buy a leather jumpsuit for his gay lover.”

“I was fourteen when I saw the Loch Ness monster.”

“My picture of Elvis is bleeding.”

“Ira looked out over the field of combatants, all fifteen hundred of them, and wondered when, exactly, he’d lost his mind.”

It’s generally agreed that the writers’ code of etiquette stipulates time shares in hell for blabby book reviewers who give away endings. But one trusts that succumbing to the urge to quote first sentences is at worst a venial offense. In the case of Tod Goldberg’s new story collection, “Simplify,” these lines serve not only to show how a seductive pull can radiate from a handful of words, they also stand as markers for certain traits shared among the 12 stories in the novelist’s first collection: They are almost all told in the first person, the narrator-protagonist is a boy or young(ish) man, and there is an omnipresence of bizarre apparitions, as well as uninvited drop-ins from beyond reality.

In Goldberg-land, logic is of the dream variety, and reason doesn’t stand a chance. The first and perhaps most affecting story, “The Jesus of Cathedral City,” features a young, loving, service-economy couple (“We just want a simple life”) who receive the decidedly mixed blessing of finding Jesus -- really finding Him. They drop in total confusion to their knees upon recognizing the Son of Man “walking down the street in the annual Christmas Gay Pride Cavalcade, wearing a dress that made Him look like Scarlett O’Hara.” A post-parade friendship forms over lattes: “ ‘Will we see you again?’ ... ‘I expect that the three of us will run into each other

Endings, in general, are not Goldberg’s strong suit. With the notable exception of “Myths of Our Time,” the closing paragraphs of these engrossing tales tend to fall rather flat. At best the wearied narrator may pose an additional question or two, but he is unable or unwilling to speculate on the chain of often supernatural events to which he’s been subjected. “Subjected” is a key term here, because the Goldberg narrator tends to be a passive kind of guy, a good-hearted Joe at bottom even though he may go through a patch of doing bad things, such as letting his best friend get clubbed to death or robbing the Dairy Queen or cutting out on a girl he knocked up. A relative of Kafka’s K. and George Saunders’ hirelings, he remains, despite all efforts to dodge harm, the bewildered recipient of his hit-and-run fate.

What’s at stake, then? Apart from incursions of the supernatural, “Simplify” works certain besetting themes. Five of these stories center on children who are lost or have met a violent death -- often the child is the narrator’s sibling. In three of them suicide looms large, while five again (obviously there is overlap) feature a protagonist whose heart and sanity have been left on life support by the girl who walked away. But for all of this thematic repetition, each story excites on its own. Fortunate the writer who discovers his obsessions early, for he’ll have that much more time to transform them in fiction, to provoke the sources of their fearsome power.

A short story is all about voice, and Tod Goldberg’s fine ear for dialogue and for the spoken nuances of social microstrata enable him to dispense with reams of descriptive background and cut straight to the heart of the matter. If sometimes his overwhelmed characters fail to fully engage emotionally, their deadpan delivery of jolting ironies reaches to laugh-out-loud heights of insight.

Even the collection’s title has a sardonic ring. While hardly simple, “Simplify” is devilishly entertaining.

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