Yet another debut collection by a young male author destined to be labelled “edgy,” Nathan Sellyn’s Indigenous Beasts features what is becoming a typical cast of characters for fiction of this ilk: dealers, users, ravers, trailer dwellers, drunks, and the disillusioned of all stripes. What may once have been the underexplored corners of our society have by now been thoroughly swarmed by fiction’s panoptic eye. Plotwise, there is little new here, and Sellyn’s prose, though often vivid and occasionally hilarious, lacks the stylistic pizzazz his volatile subject matter seems to demand.

Although Sellyn does attempt a nice range of narrative voices – from rugged kids to twentysomethings to the authoritative third-person and more – there are many awkward slips, little fissures in diction or syntax that let us glimpse the author grappling with a character’s consciousness. When a drifter tells us in the last sentence of “Animals” that he’s “headed for somewhere where looking out for someone else wasn’t bound to mean your life was over,” he suddenly sounds like a different person, not the quippy rustic heard through most of the story, but a verbose author rushing to a conclusion. And indeed, the endings of these stories often flounder in just this way, aiming for resonance but coming off feeling truncated.

Fortunately, though, there are good reasons to read Indigenous Beasts, and much evidence that Sellyn, at 22, has a bright career ahead. His depictions of acts of brutality – particularly in “A Bad Lake for Fishing” and “Here Be Monsters,” two of the book’s highlights – are unusually moving, wrenching without being overly aestheticized. And despite their technical glitches, these stories always keep their momentum, never feeling ponderous or static. In “A Kind of Dignity,” two Greek restaurateurs reminisce about a glorious day at the racetrack 30 years earlier, interrupting one another and bickering over little details. It’s the furthest Sellyn strays from the visceral, but the story moves at the pace of a thriller, culminating in the collection’s most satisfying ending. It’s a shame there aren’t more like it.