Scott Snyder’s protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder’s wondrous imagination there’s a thin membrane between the whimsical and the disturbing: the unlikely affair between a famous actress-in hiding after surgery-and a sporting goods salesman takes an ominous turn just as she begins to heal; an engaged couple’s relationship is fractured when one of them becomes obsessed with an inmate at the women’s prison next door.

Dark, funny, powerful, this debut collection underscores the remarkable gifts of a fiercely original young writer.