If you are one to judge books by their covers, you won't be disappointed by Susan Perabo's first collection of short stories, Explaining Death to the Dog, as both the cover photograph and the title set the tone for the kind of darkly comic, off-beat fiction she specialises in. Set on the fringes of modern America, her stories are peopled with variously unhinged characters, ordinary people trying to get on with their lives, usually against the odds. This is familiar territory to anyone who has read Lorrie Moore and, like Moore, Perabo is possessed of a laconic wit and a singular talent for unearthing the absurd in the everyday.
Quite a few of the characters here are just plain disagreeable and, in Perabo's hands, all the more entertaining for that. In the opening story, Jack, a cynical, ageing Hollywood actor, invites his elderly father to visit, only to discover the old man has taken up jewel theft to liven up his twilight years. In "Counting The Ways", a disgruntled young woman refuses to spend her inheritance on a badly-needed home for herself and her husband and instead blows it on one of Princess Diana's dresses. Then there is the old shrew, as she describes herself, who pays a visit to her daughter's high school sweetheart in Gettysburg, determined to stir up his long-dormant devotion to her own ends.
Offbeat humour, with some genuinely hilarious moments, and razor-sharp dialogue are the hallmarks of these stories, but that said, Perabo is equally capable of tenderness in her portrayals of the struggle to get through life in, say, the wake of bereavement. In fact, it's here that she's at her strongest. The title story is evidence of this - a moving, yet unsentimental account of a young mother's attempts to come to terms with the death of her infant child, it shows the range of Perabo's talent, one that we'll hopefully be hearing a lot more about.
Catherine Heaney is books editor of Image magazine