by JULIET WATERS

"Someone finally took a picture of me I don’t hate, and since I was wearing a red shirt I thought it would be the perfect holiday card," says one narrator in When the Messenger Is Hot by Elizabeth Crane. Soon she’s getting confusing responses like, "Good for you!" even though she hasn’t written anything noteworthy beyond, "Hey, Happy Holidays!" Then she gets an e-mail from a friend who’s hoping to catch her before she sends out too many cards because "she didn’t want me to embarrass myself." As her friend explains, "most people" who send out cards with pictures also have husbands or babies in the photo. The narrator replies, "I am not most people." The same could safely be said about any of the women in this debut collection of stories.

They can seem like most people. They sometimes go on nice dates with guys who dress up and pay for dinner. Most of those guys are named Dave. They are often obsessed with Dave’s ex-girlfriend, even if Dave himself has become pretty tiring. But inevitably something weird happens.

A fabulous first date is followed by a not-as-fabulous future date in a park where it is revealed that the new boyfriend is a crack addict who will suddenly shoot his pit bull in the head. One woman writes an autobiography of her life as a recovering alcoholic, sells the movie rights, and must spend an excruciating week living with a Hollywood superstar named Apple Fowler who mimics her every move and eventually takes over her life. Another woman arrives home to discover that her friends and family have staged an intervention, though she isn’t actually addicted to anything other than the AA meetings where she picks up cute guys.

Anyone who’s read Self-Help, Lorrie Moore’s debut collection, or The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank will find something similar here: a cynical-but-poetic, laugh-out-loud sense of humour. These stories play on the expectations created by the kind of fiction one might find in women’s magazines, if women’s magazines still published fiction. Since Self-Help, Moore has gone on to become one of the most respected American short story writers. Bank’s debut was a huge surprise bestseller. Crane’s narrators tend to be a little older, though not necessarily wiser, and lot more damaged. The collection is uneven. Some stories seem more like fragments, and some stories are a little too glib, especially several that deal with a mother’s cancer. But her best stories are great and, hopefully, this collection will attract the readership it deserves.

At least one story is a classic. "An Intervention" is a painfully funny satire of the recovery movement. This is the story of Alice who ends up addicted to AA meetings, even though she’s only ever been drunk once. She decides, and is supported in this belief by other AA members, that she simply recognized she was an alcoholic much earlier than most. This character’s true addiction is a type of shallow spiritual and intellectual optimism that is keeping her locked in an eternally loopy, melodramatic and frightening life in which she becomes involved with increasingly worse men. The story is hilarious, scary and hopeless. As she faces the "intervention" it doesn’t look like her life is going to get much better.

"I could tell that between the pajamas and the disarray in my house and their doubt about my alcoholism that they were formulating a B plan (contingent on my unwillingness to admit I was not an alcoholic) which was I don’t know what, because there’s no rehab for people who aren’t alcoholics."

No there isn’t. Just the kind of hell populated by friends who send cards that read, "Good For You!" Probably the best we can hope for Alice, or someone like her, is that she’ll come across a story as perfect as this one. :

When the Messenger Is Hot: Stories by Elizabeth Crane, Little Brown, hc, 210pp, $32.95