Anyone titling a book The Truth About Love is asking for trouble. The potential to sentimentalize or to make claims the book cannot sustain is daunting. Patrick Roscoe, then, should be commended for his ambition and audacity.

The Truth About Love, Roscoe’s sixth book, explores love in a variety of forms: familial, romantic, childlike, estheticized, sado-masochistic, crude. The facets of perspective are meant to form a complete picture of love – or more accurately, a picture of what can’t be articulated about it. Characters are sustained, and often broken, by love: a doting sister witnesses the self-destruction of her brother, a man learns of the murderous tendencies of his lover, a stripper balances her roles as a mother and sexual object.

These stories, interspersed with short lyrics and monologues, revolve around characters residing mostly in Regina and Brale, B.C. A piece about two siblings discovering a murdered boy is followed by a narrative focusing on the murdered boy, then one on his murderer, and eventually one on the murderer’s lover. At first one assumes that the stories will answer each other’s narrative questions – and to a certain extent, the circumstances around the boy’s murder are illuminated – but the links between the stories are essentially thematic, reflecting Roscoe’s disparate visions of love.

The result is half Faulkner, half Slacker, as figures and situations drop away and the collection follows a more dire, and ultimately less interesting, tack. Intricate family relations give way to a murder story, and eventually to a rather gratuitous exploration of love and violence. It’s a pity, because Roscoe clearly has the technical and narrative skills to tackle even as gnarly a subject as his title announces, and his command of language and character are often deft and interesting. If he had sustained his own interest in one of his narratives – certainly there is enough in many of the stories to support a whole book – he might have taught us all something about the truth about love.