Toronto-based author, poet, and musician Richard Scarsbrook is probably best known as the writer of Cheeseburger Subversive, a popular and award-winning YA novel. In Destiny’s Telescope, Scarsbrook offers up his first short story collection for adults, featuring tales that range from experimental postcard fiction to novella-length works. As the title implies, all of Scarsbrook’s collection is united by a single thematic thrust – the power of destiny, and how people are shaped and transformed by this pivotal force.

It’s unfortunate, however, that the potential of this theme is never fully realized in Scarsbrook’s writing. Too many of his characters and their situations feel overwrought and clichéd, as if lifted out of some bad afterschool special.

His portrayals of women are perhaps the most problematic. There are hometown girls with hearts of gold and names like Melody and Robin and Carolyn, who always fall for Mr. Nice Guy at the end of the story. And waitresses like Diane at Betty’s Rest Stop Diner, who falls for a world-weary biker cruising through on the Trans-Canada Highway. Then there’s Melissa, or “Missy,” the spandex-clad nympho who stars as every man’s gratuitous wet dream.

Scarsbrook also has a habit of using the same narrative devices in different stories to describe similar feelings and events. For example, in three separate stories, characters find themselves “unable to exhale” at a moment of crisis.

Some stories are moderately successful, like “The Twilight Girl,” a quirky tale about a girl with a deadly allergy to the sun. Or “The Jazz Man’s Girl,” selected by Dave Eggers for the U.K.’s Guardian Unlimited short story supplement. Yet overall, Scarsbrook’s collection is unable to truly convey how destiny converts the ordinary into the extraordinary.