John Lavery, to judge from his debut collection of short stories Very Good Butter, obviously missed that creative writing class where the instructor counselled the students to write about what they know. Abandoning the autobiographical and anecdotal, Lavery’s work takes its cues not so much from the familiar world as the symbology of magical realism and the grotesque, and the textured, associative language of Modernist pioneers like Faulkner and Woolf. For the most part the strategy serves the author well.

“‘Peter,’ Said the Bird,” for example, is a remarkable piece of sustained paranoia and regret. A man in the throes of a heart attack is first comforted, then tormented by a hallucinatory bird as he staggers through his house wondering how to fulfill an insignificant promise he made at a party four months earlier. Like the best stories in the collection, “‘Peter,’ Said the Bird” employs an idiosyncratic narrative voice and an extreme dramatic situation to explore abstract questions of identity, fate, and the limits of intimacy. Lavery is also careful to anchor the narrative with enough sensual detail to prevent it from floating up into a purely intellectual stratosphere.

However, characterization is not always Lavery’s strongest point. His protagonists tend to muse poetically on the same big philosophical questions. Unfortunately, so do many of the secondary players, and at times everyone begins to sound like the same person. On other occasions, the distinguishing features of individual characters seem contrived, as if imposed from on high to fit a story’s intellectual and symbolic schemata. This tendency is especially strong in “Manon and My Man Jack,” where the gender differences of a one-legged man and his supportive lover are polarized into a kind of highbrow Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus-style exploration of love.

This is a strong but occasionally uneven collection from an author striving to push the boundaries of the short story form without resorting to mere novelty. It’s an admirable goal, though he doesn’t always succeed.