If for some reason Sherman Alexie were to suddenly renounce Seattle and move to, say, Pismo Beach, Ryan Boudinot would immediately become the most talked-about author of literary fiction in town. They are a twinned set of figures on Seattle's literary map: the accomplished author and the up-and-coming younger star. And maybe it's due to an unconscious comparison with Alexie's larger-than-life stage persona, but in person, Boudinot is much more boring than you'd expect him to be.

Or maybe it's because of his books: Boudinot's short stories, especially those collected in 2006's The Littlest Hitler, are populated with quiet people who are booby-trapped with some sort of a freakish hang-up. The word "pervert" often comes to mind when reading his fiction: A frozen-pea inspector finds salvation in a severed finger, a serial killer discusses murder in front of his 6-year-old son's kindergarten class for career day (when one boy asks the proud dad who he's murdered, his reply, of course, is "nobody important"), and a group of clowns toasts the successful bombing of a federal courthouse to bring about the collapse of Western civilization (in a story titled "Absolut Boudinot").

So it can be a shock when you meet Boudinot. He looks medium affluent, jovial enough, and decidedly normal. With his always-just-trimmed black hair and perpetual hint of a smile, he looks and sounds like your average early-2000s Seattle dot-com employee (and for good reason; he worked for three large dot-coms earlier this decade and was laid off from all of them). Boudinot makes that normalcy work for him at his readings: When he's onstage, his voice drones with a dry, not necessarily self-aware sense of irony, like Kevin Spacey's voice-over work in American Beauty. The raw horror of his stories, the glistening meat pushed up against the shiny plastic, really comes through when he reads aloud. Many people don't realize Boudinot's real genius until they see him summoning the monstrous demons of his fiction to dance for everyone's amusement.

Boudinot's newest book is a debut novel titled Misconception. It's technically his fourth novel; the closest one to come to publication before this was Frozen Novelties, a 700-page manuscript Boudinot wrote when he was laid off from Drugstore.com in 2001. He had a prominent agent—Melanie Jackson, who's probably as notable for being married to Thomas Pynchon as for her big-name clients—behind the book, but he just couldn't get it published. Over coffee, Boudinot dismisses Novelties as an "inferior" and "very '90s novel" whose tone "didn't match the post-9/11 world."

Aside from a similar birthing story (Boudinot began seriously working on the book on the day he was laid off from Apex Learning, an online education start-up, in 2004), Misconception sounds like the exact opposite of Frozen Novelties. It's thin (just over 200 pages), it's only got two main characters, and it leaps around in time and perspective. It begins with what is possibly the best opening chapter of a novel in 2009—a quiet high-school student named Cedar brings a slide of his own semen to study in biology class—and it grimly marches forward to a disastrous climax. The book is narrated by Cedar and his first girlfriend, Kat, in a suitably confusing mesh of voices: Some passages are taken from a high-school memoir written by an adult Kat in a younger Cedar's point of view, but the change of voice from one perspective to another is so subtle as to be nonexistent in some places. (When asked if he thinks Kat is a good writer, Boudinot laughs and thinks for a minute and then replies, "Yeah, I think she's a good writer, but I don't think she thinks she is.")

"I imagined myself whittling a stick" while writing the novel, Boudinot says. "You reach a point in whittling where you sort of try to determine when it's the maximum sharpness it can ever possibly be, but if you keep whittling past that point, you're going to run out of stick." He kept shearing away extraneous material from Misconception (repeating the phrase "The story is the unit of measurement" as a kind of mantra) until finally he felt that he had pulled away as much as he could while "still leaving something there to read."

This whittling does and doesn't work. Much of Misconception's central conceit, especially the lackadaisical push and feverishly horny pull of early romance between Kat and Cedar, is remarkably warm for Boudinot, but some elements, like a divorce later in the novel, feel like unexplored elements that occur just to drive the plot forward. And Misconception's climax is completely unearned, too, a slathering of melodrama that feels uncomfortable in Boudinot's terse, incredulous language.

It's a flawed novel, but it represents a huge step forward in maturity from the flashy nihilism of Hitler. Boudinot explains what he believes the differences between his two books are: "Littlest Hitler was written in an era when it didn't seem like there were any consequences for actions, particularly politically," like the Iraq war and wiretapping. Misconception came just after the birth of Boudinot's first child, and thus much of the book was written "with an infant strapped to my chest," inspiring a more responsible worldview. He calls Misconception "a sincere novel" and says Kat and Cedar "are trying to do everything right and they're failing. I think their hearts are in the right place."

Boudinot is a very active member of Seattle's literary community. He reads in large and small group events all the time. He's a writer-in-residence at Hugo House, which means in part that he helps aspiring authors with the craft of writing. He's talking with Cornish College of the Arts about creating an MFA in creative writing, and he genuinely loves teaching. "I'm interested in the emotional aspects of writing, in the different stages of the process," he says. "There may be stages where a writer feels horrible writing a book, but there are reasons for feeling like that."

In the near future, Boudinot hopes to publish another collection of stories, and he's just completed a draft of a new novel. This one is at least three times the size of Misconception, with five primary characters, and Boudinot calls it "the most fun thing I've ever written. I want it to be this crazy ride, like something I wrote when I was in seventh grade, where anything can happen." Boudinot can't share much about the book just yet, but he admits that Michael Jackson is a character in the narrative, and he practically giggles when he discusses how Jackson's death forces the book into a kind of sci-fi alternate-history genre. His quiet demeanor cracks when he talks about it, and for a moment the bland dot-com guise disappears and you can see that Boudinot is decidedly not boring.