Marnie Woodrow’s first short story collection opens with the counsel, “Eat so that you may love: and love so that you may eat.” Linked stories are standard these days, but an author who links by way of culinary debauchery is on to something fruitful (puns can’t be helped). Woodrow’s 16 tales are rich in hedonism and corporeality, and en masse they evoke a sense of our primal appetites for food and love.

But maybe love is too strong a word.

Many stories in In the Spice House focus on revenge: an ice cream scoopette murders a customer who slobbers over her chest; young Penny slips a potent potion into the fish and chips and offs her violent father; a victim of sexual assault sends the sleazy perpetrator a jar of her excrement labeled “Rapist.” Men are predatory and perverted, hostile and violent, and their regard for women fires on degradation. Resisting the role of edible woman, Woodrow’s females are more interested in other females for romance; but even there they encounter violence, crossed signals, and loneliness. One scene takes place in the bedroom of a female chef whose walls are lined with knives – with which she “seduces” the female narrator – and whose bed is actually a butcher block.

Woodrow occasionally regards such ugliness with wit and appropriate irony, as when one of her characters develops a messy crush on Martha Stewart. Too often, though, the stories lack style and sufficient compression. They are either too short to deal adequately with rich subjects, or, in the case of the novella, “Madame Frye,” too long given such flat diction and the story’s simple plot. By scrimping on details and description, Woodrow fails to involve readers in scenes of eroticism and arousal and her stories lack the sizzle and bite of others in the genre of gay loss and love.

Though we remain distant and not particularly appalled or intrigued, this collection does not rely on the power of individual stories for its appeal. It is better consumed in one sitting, informed by the redolence of exotic spices, deep-fried halibut, 32 Flavors of melting ice cream, and the sucked out brains of simmered Cajun crawfish. And that will have to be enough.