Montreal-based Matthew Fox, an editor at Maisonneuve, has made a promising foray into the short fiction arena. A generally solid, occasionally excellent collection of short stories, Cities of Weather is set largely in urban landscapes and populated with characters in transition or crisis. The stories deal, in the main, with the psychological spaces between gay and straight, youth and adult, single and committed, life and death.

The collection starts strongly with “City of Weather,” which follows Janey through the early months following the decampment of her longtime boyfriend, Mike. While her work – cataloguing online use of art images – suffers, she finds artistic inspiration sculpting clay to the point of exhaustion every night. The story sets a high standard for the collection – the language is terse and evocative, cleverly phrased and appropriate to the characters and situations. While Janey’s trauma is well-trod ground, Fox elevates the story with vivid characterization and a keen sense of timing.

Unfortunately, some of the stories that follow fail to meet this standard, feeling like little more than stagey vignettes chronicling relationships on the rocks or pedestrian coming-of-age stories. “The Clearing” uses the device of the terminal illness of a grandparent as the backdrop for a tale that amounts to little more than adolescent angst. Similarly, “Advanced Soaring” – despite some admirable writing – seems to just run out of space, rather than building to any insight. “Alphabet City,” a story of a Montreal writer working in New York, starts strongly but is too obvious and self-conscious to be effective.

Several stories are much stronger and ultimately redeem the collection. “Go Home Lake,” which reckons with the forces of love, death, and family, benefits from a broader focus, while “The Dead Roommates” is a tightly focused, claustrophobic evocation of the interpersonal dissonance of grief and loss. The final story in the volume, “Ordinary Time,” is a powerful account of a young writer’s life, haunted by the celestial spirit of his dead mother. It’s a promising note on which to leave the collection and should bode well for future works from Fox.