The connections between the linked stories of Julie Keith’s assured new collection at first seem tenuous, distracting even. Instead of responding to each tale on its own terms, we find ourselves, like small-town gossips, looking for patterns: whose brother, sister, stepfather, or friend have we encountered in another story here? Are such conjunctions anything more than red herrings, when Keith’s characters are dispersed across North America, from a Montreal boarding-house to an East Coast beach to Boston to California?

But it seems there is a point to these ties across the global village. The connections aren’t limited to an overlapping cast of characters; they’re also thematic. Somewhere in each story is a common thread, carried like a virus, that may be traced to some shared gene or experience. All too often what’s shared is meanness, or harm, planted by families: fathers who beat, humiliated, and molested; mothers who retreated into anger, self-indulgence, dementia.

Keith, a Chicago-born Montrealer, won a 1995 Governor General’s Award nomination for her first book, The Jaguar Temple and Other Stories. This new collection, five short stories and two long ones set in the 1960s and ’70s, rewards careful reading with its deft observation (a leather armchair has a “rich, meaty smell”) and persuasive evocation of voice, relationship, and place. The mesmerizing title novella is told by a clever country girl who has come to Montreal to escape an oppressive marriage. Determined to make up for lost time, she learns that having “no feelings” is no protection against being hurt, or hurting others. Here, as elsewhere, it turns out that the devil out there is really the devil within. This can make for uncomfortable reading, and sometimes the going is downright dreary. Fortunately, there are moments of unexpected redemption, and many points of light along the way.