I do not want to read The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot. The stories are uncomfortable and violent and the people in them are vicious and abrupt. I would not want to be stuck in a lift with them. I would not want to sit and drink coffee with them. Any moment I expect these stories to tell me to bite the kerb, and then I will hear them raise their boots.

I don’t want to read these stories, but I have to read them. J. Bradley — that silver-tongued cad — makes me. You can stop reading, he whispers, but then you’ll never know. So I read, because I have to know. And it’s worth it. Bloody hell, it’s worth it.

Bradley’s stories are full of the most unpleasant and fascinating misanthropes I’ve met this year. They want to go back in time to convince their mothers to abort them. They have hate-sex. They say things like “I’m gonna fuck you so hard, you’re gonna have Down’s Syndrome”. But as soon as I start to edge away from them, there’s Bradley whispering in my ear again, and I have to keep my eyes on the page, and before I know what’s happening the story is over and these people are inside my brain. And they do not leave easily.

‘Just Do It’ is  an uncomfortably funny story about a child who sees a man on TV snorting cocaine off a knife:

While my mom was asleep, I grabbed the open box of baking soda from the fridge, then a teaspoon and butter knife out of the silverware drawer. Everything smelled like ozone and wet plastic after. I told my mom I cut myself from practicing shaving.

It’s my favourite story in the collection. Actually, it’s my favourite story of this whole week; perhaps even the month. It’s a perfect example of why I do not want to read this book: as the story progresses I just know something bad is going to happen, something terrible even, something that will make me squint up my eyes so I can’t read the words properly. And something horrible does happen, and the story has stuck in my head ever since. It’s that bad, and that good.

There’s a tenderness to these stories too, a wish that the things they do now will make things better for the future. A warning, a precursor. From ‘Primer’:

The bullet burrowed through the bark and into the trunk like a seed. Some day, I hope a little girl bites into one of these apples and coughs up the princess sleeping inside of her stomach.

This makes me think that maybe these people aren’t so awful after all. Maybe I could stand to have coffee with them. The lift might not even be so bad.

Each story is a fist to the jaw or a pinkie finger slipped into the cheek. Bradley’s style is perfect for the short form — it’s somehow wordy and sparse, words filling up the mouth but pared right to the bone. Some of the similes are so perfect that I have to put the book down and run them through my brain a few times (“My parents took pride how they stood like spoiled slaughterhouses”) and some just make me frown (“Cassie walked in our apartment like a transcription”), but I hadn’t read a single one before. Love or hate them, these similes are original, and the same can be said of the whole book.

I’m not promising that this book will leave you giggling into your lunch, or set up some pretty dreams before bed, or that you’ll be able to tell your partner about cute story you read.  In fact, you might not want to read The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot. But you have to. Trust me.

Deborah Willis’s debut short story collection Vanishing displays an impressive range of talents and voices. These fourteen long stories feel texturally distinct from one another, and the book never falls into that trap that some short story collections do where each piece reads a little like the one that preceded it. Willis tackles gambling addicts who get involved in dangerous relationships with their dealers, directionless twenty-somethings struggling to navigate the slippery politics of poverty and sex, sisters dealing with the dissolution of their hippie parents’ marriage, and a deteriorating old woman who refuses to acknowledge her daughter’s statutory rape. These stories are as varied as the characters. Alice Munro provides one of the book’s most positive blurbs, and she’s a more than an appropriate choice. Willis knows not only how to represent many types of lives but also how to understand them, to inhabit them, to make their struggles whole and ripe with meaning.

Willis often writes in short, half-a-page scenes that stand in for long stretches of time. The device is played to full effect, and like Munro, she is often able to cover entire lives, a rare feat for short stories. In the titular piece, Willis follows a daughter whose father, a well-known writer, goes missing after his possible lover becomes engaged to a beautiful woman. Willis hints early on that she’s going to dart around in time, but it’s not until the story’s final pages, in which the daughter runs into her father’s lover in a grocery store years later, that we sense the effects of losing her father so early in life. Willis writes,

She wants to ask him questions. “Have you heard anything about my father?” Or, “Do you still miss him?’ But it seems ridiculous to say those things under fluorescent lights, beside shelves of microwavable popcorn and freeze-dried soup–Neither of them suggests staying in touch, and they never see each other again. Tabitha gets a job in a bookstore”¦ she settles, for a while, into this role behind the counter. And cultivates—perfectly—the sad, knowledgeable smile that customers seem to like.

Another standout is “Escape” about a gambler who begins stalking his black jack dealer, a former magician. The protagonist is newly widowed, and he now spends his days in the casino growing more and more obsessed with his dealer and her ratty apartment in the poorer section of town. The story ends in an almost anti-climax, a dual sleight of hand employed by not only the magician but the author herself, at once hopeful and bitter-sweet.

Equally successful is the handful of stories dealing with twenty-somethings overcrowded into tiny apartments. Reminiscent of a few of the stories from Justin Taylor’s recent Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, “This Other Us” focuses on a trio of two women and one man who live together, two of whom are involved romantically—Karen and Lawrence—and a third who isn’t—Lise. When the girlfriend picks up and leaves  town, the other two fall into a bizarre sexual relationship in which Lise dresses up like Karen to please Lawrence. The denouement is handled expertly. Willis writes,

‘Do you think it’s easy? Do you think I like looking like this?’ I tore off a set of fake eyelashes, dropped it, and ground it into the carpet with my toe. “It’s like I’m ripping off a layer of my own skin, Lawrence. Every single day I’m ripping off a layer of my own skin.’

“Frank” deals with similar subject matter, focusing on a poor couple living together right after graduating high school. Mike and Simmy end up babysitting a young boy of whom Mike says, “If he were my kid, I’d have named him Captain Danger.” They dress up in adults’ clothing they get for free at the dry-cleaners where Simmy works and eventually take the young boy on the train, where of course, mild disaster strikes. The stories that work do so because they reveal a surprising interiority, moments of revelation that not only feel unexpected for readers, but seem as if they were genuine surprises for the writer, as if she developed deeper understandings of her characters over the course of the writing process.

Not every piece works. A few feel a bit by-the-numbers and more like apprentice stories than fully realized worlds of fiction tangible with feeling. “The Fiance”, about a woman in a long distance relationship with her future husband, takes a predictable turn into well-trodden territory with little to make the subject matter new again. “The Weather” is told from the perspective of a farmer who lusts for his teenage daughter’s best friend. The story climaxes exactly where you expect to it with a revelation that’s been seen again and again. And due to the nature of Willis’ ability to capture the moods of so many diverse people and locations and times, the book occasionally feels directionless, as if the stories aren’t tied together thematically in any inherent way. But these types of stories are rare, and for the most part, Willis delivers a bold debut collection that signals the arrival of an already very mature writer.

When her stories really work in tandem, they recall the razor-sharp clarity and surprise of Dan Chaon’s Among the Missing, another book that like Vanishing is obsessed with absence and the methods we use of filling the holes left in our lives. What’s impressive about Willis is that like Chaon, even in her first collection knows enough to not answer the majority of the mysteries she sets up. She lets them float out and out and out, gaining a collective power that lives and breathes within Vanishing’s most powerful stories.

Nuala Ni­ Chonchoir’s debut novel, You, is set in 1980 Dublin against the charged backdrop of the River Liffey. The novel tells the turbulent story of a ten-year-old girl and her broken family. Narrated through the child’s point of view and told in the second person, this novel uses plain prose, vivid detail, fresh images, and the delightful Dublin vernacular. You is a compelling story that brings to life complex characters and delivers hard-hitting truths.

At the novel’s opening, the narrator’s single mother, Joan, attempts suicide and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Even after her discharge and return home, Joan remains depressed, abuses alcohol and, to varying degrees, neglects her three children. Joan also has a sinister love interest, Kit, and he and the novel’s plucky narrator often collide. Indeed one of my favorite scenes comes early in the novel when the narrator innocently walks in on Kit in the bathroom. Several terrible moments pass where Kit remains exposed and relishes, insists on, her seeing him. This moment reveals volumes about both Kit and the child and is expertly and economically handled by Ni­ Chonchair.

Perhaps what I most admired and appreciated about this novel and Ni Chonchair’s great skill set is the enormous restraint she employs, particularly around the novel’s central tragedy and her portrayal of the narrator’s mother, Joan. These characters are fully and compassionately drawn and cannot be easily judged or condemned. More, Ni Chonchair deftly employs humor throughout and achieves great pathos in what is at times a deeply troubling tale. Issues of death, suicide, mental illness, neglect, abuse, alcoholism, and brokenness are central to this novel.

You brought back so many memories of my Dublin childhood in the 80’s, everything from something as small as the orange cellophane wrapping on Lucozade bottles to something as huge as visiting my mother in St. Brendan’s Psychiatric Hospital. I, too, grew up around water, the Royal Canal. That canal, just as the River Liffey here, left an indelible mark on my psyche. Much of the suffering, disappointment, and harrowing sense of abandonment in these pages also resonated. For my tastes, the novel perhaps ended on too neat a note. However, to Ni­ Chonchair’s great credit, long after I turned the last page, I’m still thinking about this tragic family. I worry for them, especially for the burdened, feisty, and sensitive child narrator. I also hope hard.