Elmore Leonard’s prime rule for writing reads as follows: “If it sounds like writing, I re-write it.” It is the type of pithy pronouncement that rings with hard-boiled wisdom, but Leonard’s dictum excludes the possibility that one person’s idea of stylized or overly cunning writing is often another’s notion of art. Many passages in Charlotte Gill’s debut story collection, Ladykiller, “sound like writing,” but this deliberate and persistent stylishness – in combination with her bleak choice of subject matter – might very well be the author’s point.

Gill’s characters find themselves doggy-paddling around the bottom of life’s barrel, exhibiting a harsh bewilderment at their miserable lot. Whether crushing on a 16-year-old jailbait scuba student, shagging the ethics professor, or spitefully prodding the bruised ego of a twin sister, these youngish, urban – and above all world-weary – souls find respite only in the masochistic aspects of their most intimate relationships. A partner is “someone to escape from, yet a body to ram up against.”

Gill places her couples on the perpetual verge of collapse, terminally annoyed with each other, then compelled by some outside force – a crying baby in the downstairs apartment, an ailing mother-in-law – to the very edge of reason, and often to the zenith of their loveless passion.

Here are people simmering in angst and nearly crippled by a pervasive ennui whose source seems both amorphous and omnipotent: “Movies bored her. Everything bored her halfway through.” Of course, it doesn’t help the blighters that most of their world seems constructed like a shoddy movie set. In the title story, while shopping at The Bay with his mother and girlfriend, Gary, an unapologetic womanizer, initiates a sexual encounter with a salesgirl in the backroom of Santa’s workshop, “which is seamy and cluttered … where the real work gets done.”

Gill scripts her scenes in filmic bursts, using short, snappy sentences and fragments to telegraph visuals even as she primes us for an ironic finale: “Mobile homes. Box-like bungalows with claptrap additions. Dwellings in denial.” Hers is also a fiercely contemporary world, where a teenager carries a cellphone “so small he could swallow it,” and the aforementioned twins work for a company that makes software for surveillance cameras.

These topics and descriptive tactics are well wed to Gill’s characters’ sensibilities and make for some cleverly arresting observation and imagery. Her sense of satire is no less honed. In “The Art of Medicine,” a med student’s roommate abandons her women’s studies thesis in favour of self-help seminars with an organization called The Power, and a university’s administrative staff is composed of “the kind of women who talked about liberal politics, then tabulated the length of each others’ coffee breaks.”

But if the attitude and artfulness of Gill’s prose boost her characters’ and settings’ zing-factor, they also sap the strength from some of her stories. Despite its frequent gleams of insight and technical prowess, the collection’s smug tone often pre-empts any sense of narrative surprise. Nowhere is this more evident – and perhaps purposefully so – than in the opening story, “You Drive.”

The story is carved up into discrete chunks, with the order of events reversed, so that we begin by reading about a couple’s car accident, then proceed back in time through their recent past. Like all of Gill’s men and women, these two hit and miss when it comes to meaningful connections. In a comment that could easily sum up Ladykiller’s aesthetic, the female protagonist concludes that “[w]ith men, things went so predictably, cataclysmically wrong. She nudged herself into these endings, as if they were pre-written, and in a particular way it satisfied.”

The message of Ladykiller is clear: what’s bad will likely get worse, or at the very least repeat itself. So, if smart shotgun prose, self-conscious urbanity, and an apocalyptic view of personal relationships are your thing, then Gill is most definitely your girl. But for me, the cumulative effect of these grim anti-epiphanies was one of stasis; I often found myself craving not resolution, or even minor redemption, but some small sense of movement in a character’s consciousness.

Fortunately, the collection’s sense of inevitability is tempered in its final story, “Island of Flowers,” whose emotional scope and psychological complexity – its preoccupation with “the black crud of memory” – push Gill’s writing to more vulnerable and exciting heights. Here, a surgeon/philanderer begins an affair while on vacation, leaving his young daughter to play with his paramour’s son. When the son and daughter meet by chance years later in an airport, they begin their own affair of sorts, avoiding the frisson of sex for the thrill in exchanging “facts” about their parents’ fraught liaison. In this story, Gill’s talents come to the fore, and her intense “writing” is matched by the unpredictable intricacy and poignancy of her characters’ circumstances.