by JULIET WATERS

When “Until Gwen” was published in Best American Short Stories 2005, Dennis Lehane wrote an explanation in the contributors’ notes of how the story came into being.

“I took a notepad out onto my front porch, which is surrounded by a hundred-year-old wisteria, and this rainstorm hit, a huge one, bending trees, clattering all over the street and the roof. But the wisteria kept anything from hitting me. I wrote the first draft that night, on my porch, in this crazy storm. It was supposed to be a comic story—that first line, hell, the whole first scene, is pretty absurd—but page by page it kept getting darker and darker until it ended up being arguably the darkest thing I’ve ever written. The writing of it, though—that whole storm-within/storm-without, mad-scientist vibe—was one of my favorite creative experiences.”

Here’s that first line in case you’re curious: “Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the backseat.” For Lehane, who wrote the novel that became the academy award winning film Mystic River, “darkest thing I’ve ever written” is a scary thought. Best known for powder-keg plots set in the emotional tundra of working-class America, Coronado, a collection of Lehane’s shorter work reads like a rainy afternoon on your porch with a semi-automatic.

I chose that comparison carefully, since due to recent events, Montrealers who read Coronado are far more likely to be disturbed by the first story, than they are by “Until Gwen,” which is included here as well. “Running Out of Dog” tells the story of a man who becomes increasingly certain that a childhood friend is about to set off on a gunman massacre.

While Lehane might describe himself as a mad scientist, I imagine him at work looking something more like a mad geometrist. This collection, bleak as it is, is like a kaleidoscope of black, of triangles within circles. Relationships recur in simple arrangements, two men and a woman, two women and man, a protagonist, an antagonist and his sister—all of these set spinning around inside the wheels of fortune and misfortune. Yet as stormy and dramatic as these relationships are, the emotional logic that motivates these characters works like a chillingly calm eye at the centre.

“Running Out of Dog” takes place in the ’70s, a time that Lehane returns to again and again in his fiction, perhaps because it was a time before men became more self conscious of the costs of emotional repression. Eden Falls is a small town in South Carolina in the beginnings of a tourist boom. The only thing getting in the way of a plan to create a mega amusement park is an overabundance of dogs. So many end up as roadkill on the I-95 that South Carolina is developing a nickname, The Devil’s Kennel. A Vietnam vet, Elgin Bern, is one of the first men in the town that the corrupt mayor appeals to in a plan to reduce the dog population. He refuses, so the job of dog executor goes to Bern’s childhood friend, a sad trailer park loner named Blue.

Small-town love triangles converge to frustrate and tease Blue into an emotional intensity he’s not used to. The fury that’s been lying dormant since his terrible childhood as the son of a trailer park hooker, is exacerbated by this new job that fuels a bloodlust. Bern, who is doing his best to normalize after his war trauma, is put in the impossible situation of being the only person close enough to Blue to see what’s going on, and one of the few people experienced enough to recognize what’s happening and what will happen when Blue starts “running out of dog.”

Like all the stories in this riveting collection, the darkest thing about them is knowing that there is no such thing as darkest.

Coronado by Dennis Lehane, William Morrow, hc, 232pp, $24.95