There’s a certain strain of contemporary women’s lit – particularly the “textural” short story – that’s very big on oblique domestic scenes, memories of childhood, protracted silences, windows, kitchenware, loss, and secrets. At times these works become the prose equivalents of museum gift shops – there’s a lot of women around, and “craft,” and prettily framed emotion.

Natalee Caple’s group of short stories The Heart Is Its Own Reason is more likeable than most of this kind of writing. Not only does Caple have an assured sense of the perversities of life, but for the most part these works aren’t inert sachets of poetic prose – in Caple’s world, shit happens, and the characters get out of the house.

In “The Trouble with Killing Someone You Know,” an ordinary middle-aged husband named Moss plans to kill his brother, who long ago murdered Moss’s child. Moss conspires with his wife, and the two commence to beat the brother to death. But the revenge killing collapses into a sort of Tarantinoesque folly, and things fail to unfold as planned. “The Pigeon” has a similar respect for the unexpected – in the middle of a particularly grotty sex scene involving a hooker and a demanding john, a cat swallows a needle and nobody gets the climax they anticipated. In “The Price of Acorn” what begins as the story of a naïve marriage ends in a smuggling operation involving a child, a truck, and a spin cycle.

Caple has difficulty with dialogue, however, especially when she’s attempting working class speech. Too many conversations are like literary incantations, and so redolent of Creative Writing 101 that breathless, girly talk about angels with broken wings and the sexuality of breast feeding simply drove this reader away.