Short story collections are a rare pleasure, a chance to glimpse an author’s fascinations and preoccupations across a series of vivid imaginings, each individual ‘blazing moment’ nonetheless contributing to a unified whole. That pleasure is front and centre in Laura Jean McKay’s Gunflower, an entrancing work filled with stories that stick in your memory like a knife and tales that return to haunt you in the quiet hours of the night. McKay takes the reader from birth to death, examining the relationships that bind and define us, while immersing each story in a pensive, surreal sheen that makes the mundane seem just as strange as the fantastical.

After the landmark success of her novel The Animals In That Country, Laura Jean McKay’s return to short fiction treads familiar but fertile ground, once again delving deep into the often-tortured complexity of familial bonds and interrogating our cruel and contradictory treatment of animals. Stories in which estranged daughters return strangely stand beside shattered narratives of a new mother’s new grief, while the horrors of factory farming take on mythic dimensions in the voices of the farmed. The collection’s opening story, a sombre tale of a failing cat-pelt farm, is especially effective, highlighting our arbitrary distinctions between pet and prey with a simple, stunning inversion. Yet the magic of Gunflower is that these stories are never about just one thing, never ‘solved’ – instead, they are windows into strange, expansive worlds, worlds that are difficult to forget.

Two stories are especially memorable: in one, a ship is lost and in the other, a ship returns. The title story delivers an uneasy nightmare of abortion ships and an America set adrift in its war against women’s bodies. In ‘Site’, a simple drama of desire and faithlessness is overtaken as a vision of the past slowly ploughs towards a unsettling conclusion. Gunflower would be worth reading for these stories alone – the fact that they are accompanied by nearly two dozen more is a true privilege.