Sometimes literature translates into music in my head; in this case, The Faint’s 2001 album Danse Macabre. Prior to seeing The Faint live on that tour, I had not witnessed men move so sinuously—it was as if their waists were elastic bands stretching in time to the beat. I was in awe. The crowd, too, was bewitched. It was a high-energy show to be sure, though not the kind of raw, messy energy I’d encountered at the punk shows I usually attended. This was a cleaner, colder kind of power, jagged like the teeth on a gleaming saw blade. I was into it.

Anna Krivolapova’s stories recollect that feeling. Her prose undulates the way those men did on stage that night. And yet despite its suppleness, her writing can also be knife-sharp. Paranoia ripples on the page, bubbling between the words, slyly waiting to bite into you. The settings reflect a shadow society: an intricate Eastern European diaspora covertly stitched behind the bland scenery of the Washington, DC suburbs—nothing towns blurred into a smear of strip malls packed with salons, ethnic eateries, and no-name convenience stores. On occasion, the stories stray north along the Eastern Seaboard into that hinterland formed by the highway-encysted confluence of Southeastern PA, South Jersey, and Northern Delaware. These in-between places float in a common cosmopolitan stream bereft of the glamor of NYC or the self-importance of DC proper. They are significant only in their insignificance—banal backdrops for hyper-exposed scenes of subtle or overt criminality, pharmacological abuse, and quotidian violence.

The scenes meld together into meandering plots with abrupt endings—often inexplicable but realistic in their mutability. Even in her dystopias, Krivolapova keeps the world-building measured and rooted in the contemporary familiar, focusing instead on what her characters say and do, and delivering it all in a knowing, darkly humorous style. Tragic yet resilient figures abound in a milieu of Slavic fatalism that assumes (and even embraces) the near-constant presence of conspiracy. Women dominate the narratives. Though sometimes slippery in their allegiances, they are fiercely supportive of each other in a clannish way. They all appear to be vaguely following an esoteric code of unknown provenance.

Krivolapova said in an interview that she strives for hyperrealism. I think she achieves it. I love this type of style, but I rarely find it deployed so successfully. Not a single story failed to win me over in some way. A couple of favorites: ‘The Great Wave Off Kawasaki’, in which a woman narrates the story of her adopted brother and his odd inclinations, manages to be simultaneously morbid, poignant, and hilarious in a short span of pages; and ‘Refrigerator Death Index’, a scathing satire of white saviorism focused on a couple’s four teenage girls, each adopted from a different low-income country, who are subject to the humiliating performativity of their mother’s callous self-righteousness. The plot is wonderfully absurd, with vivid characters and pithy, acerbic dialogue. Having now devoured this collection, I look forward to hopefully one day reading the two (!) novels Krivolapova has reported she is working on.