There is something very Canadian about the stories in this, Jack Hodgins’ third collection. It’s not just that many of them are set in the author’s native B.C. – on the coast or the islands or in logging settlements – since some unfold further afield, in a German town or the backroads of Mississippi. It’s not even his characters, bookended as they are by relatives and responsibilities, by wayward or oblivious children and parents. Instead, it is the stories themselves‚ gentle yet unsettling, their promise of a melodrama or climax that morphs into something far less easy or obvious.

Often the stories’ tension takes the form of a stranger who intrudes to test the protagonist’s ties to reality, bringing the familiar into sharp relief. In the most satisfying tales, a sense of foreboding is stealthily replaced by a deeper, farther-reaching mystery. This is the case in the novella-length “Inheritance,” in which an elderly woman, saddled with the role of executrix for an ailing uncle’s will, must grapple with not only predatory neighbours intent on swindling his money, but also her own shifty notions of goodness. Unfortunately, some of the shorter stories truncate this tricky style of conveying meaning.

The most visceral, immediate, and true story in the collection is “Over Here,” in which an eight-year-old boy befriends (condescendingly) a young Indian girl adopted into a white family in his secret-riddled town. Here, Hodgins skillfully unravels his narrator’s preconceptions, giving him, and the reader, a glimpse of the boy’s precarious place in the community and a deeper understanding of the ways our imaginations betray us.

This is not flashy stuff. Hodgins’ descriptions, much like his characters, are seemingly simple and down-to-earth but rarely lacking in depth: “He felt strangled in a tie but would not have come without one.” And, like his conflicted photographer, a tourist adrift in Faulkner country in “Galleries,” Hodgins’ stories are at their most powerful and challenging when they succeed in “discover[ing] the unexpected in the midst of the merely picturesque.”