Among the impressive lineup of talent assembled in the 2010 speculative fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards, a pair of stories by a couple of newcomers stood out: Matthew J. Trafford’s “The Divinity Gene” and Buffy Cram’s “Large Garbage.” Trafford’s debut collection, which takes its title from his story, was published last year, and is now followed by Buffy Cram’s debut. (All three books are published by Vancouver’s Douglas & McIntyre.)

As in Trafford’s case, Cram’s best story is the one that appeared in Darwin’s Bastards, which is some credit to that anthology’s editor, Zsuzsi Gartner. Most of the stories in Radio Belly have a similarly speculative, off-kilter tinge, with people breaking down mentally (the title story, for example, describes a case of schizophrenia) and the world breaking down in other ways. In “Large Garbage,” the social order in an upper-class bedroom community disintegrates in a tide of overeducated bohemians and vagrants, while in “Floatables: A History,” the environment has collapsed, and our overheated planet has been swamped by rising sea levels.

Cram is at her best in stories like these, in which her characters – like the disturbed woman in “Mineral by Mineral” – experience a shift in reality as “not a breaking down but a breaking through.” A loss of balance leads to a new understanding, often through reconnection with childhood. The less successful pieces are more conventional: “Mrs. English Teacher,” for example, about a woman who goes to teach in an unidentified but troubled country, or “Drift,” which follows a woman on a cross-country trip to find her missing immigrant mother.

The title of “Drift” points to a theme, suggested also by the people on the floating island in “Floatables,” or the woman and her son who are adopted by pirates in “The Moustache Conspiracy,” or the narrator of “Large Garbage,” who cuts himself loose from his bourgeois existence to go “drifting into dreams.” There’s a consistency here that sometimes results in stories left hanging on a vague and unsatisfying note, but also allows Cram to represent shifts of mental and emotional ballast with a very light and descriptive touch.