Crash sites

“IN my business, I deal in collisions, mostly, and people make claims, redressing the world’s suddenly revealed bias -- for a scene of an accident is always a cruel, unusual, lonely, but somehow plotted injustice.” So muses the claims-adjuster narrator in “Blessing,” one of the eight dazzling stories that make up this long-awaited collection from Charles D’Ambrosio, his first since 1995’s highly praised “The Point.” The same observation could apply to D’Ambrosio, whose densely packed stories, many of them as rich in plot and character as full-blown novels, tend to deal in messy collisions -- between men and women, children and parents, truth and secrets, sanity and dysfunction.

There are tales here of patriarchs reduced in circumstance and stature, made into living shadows. In “The High Divide,” an improbable pair of boyhood friends -- a have-not from a Catholic orphanage and a pudgy, well-off brat fixated on Sasquatch -- go on the kind of camping excursion into the Olympic Mountains that could be excerpted from the pages of Boys’ Life, were it not full of achy revelations about the adult world, including an impending divorce and an institutionalized, out-of-it father. The title character in “Screenwriter” has run aground in a psych ward after a lifetime of Hollywood excess, in which, he reports, “dreams of hurting myself ... formed a kind of lullaby I often used to rock myself to bed at night.” His unexpected ardor for a ballerina given to self-mutilation and cigarette burns (“I totally dug her broken bohemian thing”) propels him deeper into despair even as it returns a much-needed portion of his lost poetic youth.

As often as D’Ambrosio explores baffling debilitations and pharmaceutical highs and lows -- they crop up everywhere from porn-film sets (in the title story, which has nothing to do with fish or museums) to typewriter repair shops (in “Drummond & Son”) -- he demonstrates a gentle flair for mapping quiet emotional outbacks. His couples cling to each other -- bound as much by mutual suspicion as fond regard -- amid potentially hostile climes. An insurance adjuster and his actress wife in “Up North,” for instance, journey to a remote northern Michigan cabin for a Thanksgiving family ritual that involves turkey hunting, goodly amounts of Scotch and the roiling, unacknowledged fact of a long-ago sex crime. In “Blessing,” a similar pair (insurance guy and actress) leave New York City to stake their claim to a piece of countryside in Washington state, believing that “the earth was our present, that the crossroads was the ribbon wrapping it, and that our house, shabby as it may have seemed, was the somewhat frilly bow atop this wonderful gift.” Their house honeymoon is rudely disrupted by the arrival of her alcoholic father, her scheming loser of a brother and a biblical downpour. And in an astonishing story called “The Scheme of Things,” a pair of grifters, Lance and Kirsten, bounce around wide-open Iowa, gaping at the endless fields of corn and canvassing for a sketchy charity called BAD, or Babies Addicted to Drugs. Naturally, they pocket all the donations, scant as they are. Their modus operandi resembles something out of “Badlands,” and you get a queasy feeling every time they approach the next farmhouse or whenever Lance spits out another Starkweather-esque observation (“Without money, we’re just trying to open a can of beans with a cucumber”). The unsettling aura only deepens when you realize that Lance and Kirsten are harmless and that D’Ambrosio is building, one masterful episode at a time, toward a heartbreaking meditation on motherhood.

Like the grieving heir of “The Bone Game,” who tools around Seattle in an old Eldorado trying to find the right spot to dump his grandfather’s ashes, D’Ambrosio’s men and women make their way over a landscape of troubled Americana. They belong to that major strain of contemporary fiction that runs straight through the work of D’Ambrosio’s Pacific Northwest predecessors, Raymond Carver and Thom Jones (another writer we’re due to hear from).

D’Ambrosio, who should be ranked up near Carver and Jones on the top tier of contemporary practitioners of the short story, manages to channel Carver’s deftly elliptical manner and Jones’ wounded machismo. Yet in this collection he marks out his own territory, using only the most steadfast and difficult of a writer’s tools -- craft and character -- and his own marvelously skewed lens, in which adult-video directors aspire to quote from “Citizen Kane,” tom turkeys die in furtherance of the promise of romance and couples continually discover, like Lance and Kirsten, that they’re “living lives that [are] upside down.”