Stan Rogal’s voice in his new story collection, What Passes for Love, is immediately familiar and appealing. His dense sketches (no paragraph breaks, little punctuation) are interior monologues that draw us quickly into his narrators’ minds and actions.

In the first three stories, and again later in the collection, his monologues explore singular events made richer by the layering on of memory and reverie: riding the subway home, a man is subsumed into the body of a woman; another man investigates his wife’s physical mutation into someone else. The strength of these is occasionally compromised by the density of the language which, although effective at establishing lyrical intimacy, is distracting. In “We’re Right in the Middle of It” the thoughts and feelings of the characters narrating seem less important than the story’s cadence and language.

With the fourth and fifth stories, Rogal rapidly reels us out from the interior spaces of his flowing monologues and into a space of clipped, understated, nuanced language and conventional narrative form. Although strong technically and stylistically, this work tends to fall back on predictable plot lines. Perhaps the most conventional of his narrative stories, “I Don’t Have a Problem” is well crafted but full of a disturbing certainty (the boy, being persistent and awkwardly honest enough, gets the girl).

Rogal seems to have lost much of the power that we find in his monologues with this formal shift to narrative. One of several exceptions is “Exhibition,” in which a young artist has a near affair with a new woman and returns home to his girlfriend. Here, Rogal’s quick descriptive sketch reveals this man’s fatigue and boredom; by not capitulating to conventions like closure, the author heightens his character’s malaise and state of non-communication.

These stories are fun to read. In places, however, Rogal seems not to trust the potential magic truth of metaphor: “I felt her freckles shift between our flesh like strange exotic fish. At least, I imagined it was happening. It was beautiful.” Shortchanged on beauty. Where he leaves out the qualifier and trusts the metaphor is where we find the beauty in these stories.