Reading a collection of short stories from cover to cover is a little like tackling the collected works of a novelist all in a row: after a while the reader finds motifs and themes repeating themselves, as if a dozen acting troupes were improvising skits on the same idea. This is not a criticism so much as an acknowledgement of the boundaries of any artist’s personal vision. The challenge for the writer is to find enough variations on the themes that absorb them, and to craft their work so that the characters and images continually surprise the reader.

Rhymes with Useless, the first collection of short stories from Victoria poet Terence Young, is more than up to the challenge. In the rain-soaked towns and islands along the North American Pacific Coast, love wanes or grows, families fall apart or cling together, and ordinary people find themselves painted into domestic corners and wondering what happened. Young is familiar with this emotional and geographical terrain and demonstrates his characters’ interior lives and motivations through their words and actions, a vastly underrated skill. Yet the stories are not throwbacks to Raymond Carver minimalism: the writing style is too generous, varying cadence and sentence lengths, and the narrative structures often bend to meet the psychological states of the stories’ protagonists.

The stories do tend to end abruptly, though, at the cusp of a personal insight or possibly life-changing action. This technique is usually effective, as in “Pig on a Spit,” where the story of a reluctant reunion between a teenage boy and his ne’er-do-well father draws to a sudden close as the previously withdrawn son compliments his father on a well-tossed bocci ball. Young provides just enough detail to allow the reader to follow the characters’ lives beyond the story’s boundaries. However, there were instances when I found myself reading the last sentence of a story wanting to shout, “Hey, I was just getting interested!” But this is a mild criticism, one I wouldn’t bother making if I weren’t so engaged by the material.