In the film Apocalypse Now – which functions as a backdrop to one of the stories in this collection – the jungle starts to pick off the increasingly delirious Yanks as they journey upriver, turning the voyage into a lush nightmare. As the bodies pile up, the crew’s mantra becomes “don’t get off the boat.” With this group of seven short narratives set in tropical locales, Adam Lewis Schroeder not only gets off the boat, but takes readers along with him for the ride.

What he finds outside the boat is not simply a sense of how unknowable and alien the “natives” and landscapes are, but a conviction that for travellers and inhabitants alike life doesn’t resolve itself into neat stories. Kingdom Of Monkeys shows fragments of lives lived in hot, heady climates, like snapshots scattered across The Beach.

The stories are vignettes told by (and about) the transient crowd, from the turn of the last century to the present: the distracted Chiang Mai hotel porter whose paranoia escalates into a knife fight; the would-be painter whose idyll in the Dutch East Indies ends with the invasion of the Japanese; the Vancouver backpackers who encounter a little violence not covered in their student travel handbooks.

Schroeder has a light, lucid touch; he resists the two pitfalls of the genre, namely heavy-handed condemnation of Western consumerism and its evil twin, goggle-eyed promotion of Eastern mysticism. Schroeder is young – he understands that nature vs. culture baggage belongs to another generation; in his world, we all wear the same logoed T-shirts, and we all have the same need to get somewhere.

Just how West and East mix it up is superbly conveyed in the standout story, “Beautiful Feet,” which follows a family of evangelical Canadians in the badlands of Lintek, outside Manila, where echoes of Conrad and Coppola don’t augur well for their Christian view of things. Altogether, the only misstep here is the book’s title, which is a little too safe. Kingdom Of Monkeys sounds like another name for Disney’s Jungle Boat Cruise; this book is a more sinister ride than that.