In my experience – and I’m a sucker for a good laugh – comedy relies on two conditions. One is a particular form of collusion between writer and reader. The other is a sense of familiarity, so that when the punchline arrives it is simultaneously surprising and predictable. Thistledown Press’s Opening Tricks, a collection of comic short stories for young adults, faces a challenge on both fronts. Collusion with adults is fairly low on most young adult agendas, and short fiction provides little space to build familiarity.

The contributors to Opening Tricks and its editor, Peter Carver, have dealt sensibly with this dilemma by largely ignoring the demands of theme and defining comedy very broadly. Of the 13 stories in the collection, only two struck me as plain old funny. One is a nudge-nudge snicker tale by Eric Nicol about a boy’s sexual fantasies surrounding his first date with the Grade 11 bombshell. He “concentrated on the mental video of his putting his arm around the waist of Adele Pike-Forsyth. That image only enlarged when he went to bed. He had never before had trouble sleeping under a tent.” You get the idea. The other yuck-yuck example, a closer fit to my own funny bone, is Beverley Brenna’s “Toe Jam,” a slapstick delight about a boy who gets his big toe stuck in a vacuum cleaner. This was the one that made me laugh out loud on the subway, but then I’m partial to stories in which the fire department gets called in.

Apart from this pair of confections the stories in Opening Tricks simply explore a variety of young adult experience – school, friends, work, sex, family – and exhibit a range of sensibilities – sardonic to lyrical, journalistic to surreal. Some of the elements are predictable. We get zits, hair, alienation, intimidation, and exclusion. More surprising are the number of babies and toddlers, including one in Diana C. Aspin’s “Mom?!” who might be the reincarnation of the protagonist’s recently deceased mother. These little children seem to represent both the power of innocence and a longing for a time when life was more integrated. As the narrator of Karen Krossing’s gross-out story “Dragon’s Breath” says of his babysitting charge, “Somehow, Daisy made me feel that adulthood wasn’t something I was growing into but that childhood was something that I was forgetting. I felt like I’d fallen out of something.” Cyberspace is another recurring territory that’s explored in Cheryl Archer’s neatly constructed and moving “Wishing on the Mouse,” which is the story of a mother who takes off to find the kindred spirit she met on the Internet. Cyberspace is also the setting for Sharon Stewart’s witty fantasy “Flying Toasters,” about a screen saver program out to save the world.

The best of the stories revolve around a moment in which perceptions shift – the defining moments of adolescence. The first two stories in the collection express this in echoing passages. Josh, in the opening story “The Trickster,” is being threatened by a gang. In the middle of this terrifying experience “Josh felt a small click inside himself – like something moved, shifted, and snapped into a new place.” In the next offering, the reincarnated baby story, we meet Ruby, who at a turning point in the narrative feels her “scalp shift, as though her skull was the earth itself, its plates easing together to make brand new continents.” To anyone courageous enough to really remember the plate tectonics of adolescence, complete with earthquakes, this rings with the clarity of real experience. These stories vary in quality but each takes its subject seriously. Like a report from the front, they’re worthy of attention, not only from teens but from anyone with a teenager in his or her life.

This anthology is the result of a short story contest, Thistledown’s third such collection. It consists of the two winners of the contest and a selection of worthy runners-up. The obvious value of such a venture is as a showcase for writers both new and experienced. Of this year’s winners, one, Diana C. Aspin, is widely published and the other, Jacqueline Pearce, is a newcomer to print. It’s a varied anthology, stylishly produced and likely to find its audience. But there are other less obvious reasons to commend Thistledown for this project. Behind this volume is a collection of shadow books. These are the books written or about to be written by people who were kick-started by the contest. Perhaps their stories didn’t get selected. Perhaps they missed the deadline. Perhaps their half-finished efforts are shoved in a bottom drawer. But, having parked their bums in chairs and their fingers on keyboards, at least some of these people are now hooked on writing. Stay tuned. We’ll be hearing from some of them later.