Tolstoy’s famous adage about unhappy families would form a nice epigraph for Genni Gunn’s Hungers, a collection of stories that explore the fraught territory between parents, siblings, spouses, lovers, and bridge partners. Gunn, a novelist, poet, and sometime musician, creates lifelike characters whose messy emotions are almost too contiguous with our own.

In the first tale, “Los Desperados,” a couple in a floundering marriage return to Mexico, the site of their honeymoon a dozen years earlier, only to discover just how estranged they are from each other and their shared past. Gunn unfolds the story carefully, exposing the characters’ mutual betrayals with the well-paced control of a striptease. She can reveal personality through a single gesture; a macho army general in pursuit of Alice, the cuckolded wife, is said to have “a way of smiling suddenly, quickly, which makes him appear boyish. Disarmed, Alice thinks. Or is he armed?”

Gunn’s straightforward language, combined with eminently contemporary situations, makes it easy to imagine oneself into these stories and enjoy them for what they are – domestic dramas. Gunn also ambitiously attempts an almost encyclopedic look at the theme of emotional, and usually destructive, appetites, and in a bit of professional cross-pollination, peppers the tales with musical references and structures. The framework occasionally feels a bit forced, but the minute observations of family dysfunction are painfully acute. Hungers contains a number of gratifying, shop-window moments – you’re passing by, see someone inside, and with a start realize it’s your own reflection.

A fair portion of the book, however, consists of fable-like narrative fragments – experiments that lack the emotional immediacy of the more narrative pieces, and whose one-note feminism fails to say anything new on the subject. Slightly more successful pieces near the end of the book (often only one page long) explore the theme of base instincts encroaching on civilization and, in a series about sex, wolves, and murder, suggest the influence of Angela Carter’s modernized fairytales.