IT'S BEGINNING TO HURT. James Lasdun. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 227 pages. $23.

Brimming with tales from the noir side, James Lasdun's new book of short stories reveals the author's origins as a talented poet and lover of Gothic fiction. Set mainly in the backwoods of upstate New York or in rain-soaked London, where Lasdun was born, the book is rife with middle-aged men and women ill-equipped to break with their worn-out neuroses, marriages and places of origin.

Like such masters of dark literature as Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, Lasdun limns the deep cracks in the soul even as his tales are enlivened by his gift for insight and ear for language. His stories are a fury of elements: skilled dramatic monologues; sketches of fraught emotional states; postmortems of choked lives and numbed hopes and the literary equivalent of stares at the ruin left by a violent storm.

Even when they foreshadow grim outcomes, the tales are shot through with crafted verse that elegantly points to the hidden or unstrung. In Oh, Death, before a worker accidentally strangles himself with a rope, we learn that even his voice has a faulty catch, ``with a sprung quality, each word like a plucked banjo note.''

Lasdun's tales are masterful but not overly varied. Only a stoic may be able to get through 15 stories of devastation before requesting compassionate leave. Why link together so many downbeat works? The choice is at least in keeping with the precedent set by his previous books, including his horror novel The Horned Man, edged poetry collection Landscape with Chainsaw and grim thriller Seven Lies, all of which focus on the downside or loneliness of existence.

Still, if their bleak themes get repetitive, many of Lasdun's scenes will linger with the reader due to their gloomy glamour, native intelligence and creepy capacity to thrill. In the title story, after the funeral of his secret mistress, a married man mislays the family dinner in a file cabinet. The proverbial red herring is rescued from cliché and laid out like a corpse in a drawer.

Lasdun's awards -- including a (British) National Short Story prize and a Guggenheim in poetry -- point to his ability to sketch the shadows and subterranean zones of what Poe darkly called the ``tell-tale heart.'' But we're left with a ray of hope.

Susan Comninos is a writer in New York.

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@