Charles D’Ambrosio’s collection of short stories The Dead Fish Museum is awesome (you read it in a state of awe) and a bummer (certain characters are so ruined it’s hard to tell how or why they keep going, and inevitably you are reminded of people you know, or yourself). It’s exhilarating. Never mind the Northwest. There is no one better than D’Ambrosio writing stories today.

Six of the eight stories were published in the New Yorker, which gives them a sort of establishment sheen. And his writing style—traditional, poised, American—contributes to this effect. But the stuff he puts his characters through is incredibly daring. He’s like a miner. He trudges inside mountains with explosives strapped to his back, lays the explosives out all pretty-like, ignites the fuses with a Bic lighter, and then reports on what happens next. He is more interested in what happens next than anyone; the place where a story seems like it should end is right where things start to get interesting. And scary.

In the title story in The Dead Fish Museum, a carpenter has traveled to a motel with two plans: to do some work on a porn set and to kill himself. At one point a porn star named Desiree is in his room, and he’s playing with his gun. The gun and the bullets are talking to each other. (“‘Hello gun,’ he pantomimed. ‘Hi bullet.’”) Desiree interrupts him. Their dialogue goes like this:

“Why don’t you give me that gun?”

“I came here to kill myself.”

“Why?”

“Why kill myself?”

“Why come here?”

(No one writes better dialogue, either.) Then Desiree leaves his room and the guy is alone with his “black ruminations. His mind went round and round, churning pitifully, and finally he pictured himself crossing the highway and wading into the sea and pulling the trigger; if he lost nerve and flinched and only managed to blast off part of his head the ocean would drown him. It wasn’t so unusual to consider these scruples; it was like a math problem one worked until there was no remainder.” And that’s just the halfway point of the story.