CAUTION: Superlatives ahead. And they won’t be sleazy ones like luminous or powerful or impressive debut. Watch for bonkers, big, spandex, and appalling. “But those aren’t superlatives,” you say. Hang on.

Hip CanLiterati wanted All the Anxious Girls on Earth badly, wondering if the collection could make Zsuszi Gartner’s stories (already published in literary rags and Saturday Night) any tighter, any bigger. You bet. Thoughtfully ordered and sympathetically resonant, these nine stories are worthy of the recent ballyhoo (à la Schoemperlen and Munro) re: THE FORM.

Gartner wears the short story like spandex on a bicycle courier. Shiny, black, and slick, the compression and give of the genre accentuate her pumped language, her sleek plots, characters who are at worst urbanoid, at best bonkers. No, this is not Munro languid/lush. The writing is funny: think Lorrie Moore, Pam Houston, and other American needle-brains.

The stories are city-centred, mostly Vancouver, and la-la land has never been so appalling. Gartner skirts the familiar (rain, sloth, wealth) and instead details cuisine, architecture, concrete. Her “anxious girls” – “she who had looked into the face of death with its tired living room eyes and laughed” and whose own eyes are “a living room of despair, full of mismatched furniture and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, dripping all over the place, a syringe under the wicker chair, a Ouija board on the coffee table” – vacillate between slurping up urban energy and being sucked dry and crispy by its moral vacuum.

But this is not high (no slight intended) Canadian realism. Dead babies are alive and fetal; blown-to-bits teenagers return and observe their talkshow hostess mothers. Gartner modulates consciousness; she stops short of slapstick but keeps the slap. The collection suffers here and there from opening night jitters – sentences a little repetitive, a little wordy – but the superlatives stand. To sustain the ballyhoo, we need voices like Gartner’s, ones turgid with brain, heart, and wisecrack.