Some of the best stories are about Melbourne junkies, who circle one another in callous love affairs or quasi-friendships, rife with exploitation and blunt self-assessment: ‘No one becomes a junkie by accident; it takes a certain amount of determination. Sadly, that determination was never quite enough to stop being a junkie, and for years I had been in over my head.’ This is a world of household squalor, empty swimming pools, and dead connections, where characters note, in passing, the decent actions they fail to undertake.

While people are strangely dislocated in these stories, objects, too, are unmoored, drifting from their intended destinations. A scarf is taken on a journey to Sydney in an attempt to revive a comatose addict by reminding her of better times. The journey is abandoned and the scarf is tossed into the open grave of a stranger in another state – a literal rendition of the hopelessness of the original plan, and a foreshadowing of the death of the woman in Sydney. A stolen bracelet finds its way into a drained swimming pool as part of an unspoken pact between a schoolteacher clearing the way for a passionate engagement with an underage boy whom she is grooming. He traps rats, but he’s happy to move to bigger prey.

Chris WomersleyCapture and predation are starkly revealed in ‘The House of Special Purpose’. The apparently innocuous title refers to the house where the Romanovs were confined and executed. The narrator’s pregnant wife has been hospitalised; when he spends time with her Russian parents, he is brutally disabused of his belief in goodwill, connection, and the way a child might unite a family. This Little Father – the popular name of Nicholas II – is overthrown, before his child is born, in a conspiracy that may include his own wife.

In the title story, a child is able to levitate. Given the familial and social structures that Womersley imagines, this drift into the upper atmosphere seems welcome, and far less dangerous, than remaining below.

The situations the stories describe are often grim and fascinating, and the writing is terrific. A rat frets in a trap: ‘nose twitching, eyes darting from side to side. Its little pink fingers pluck at the floor of the box, like an old lady worrying at her knitting.’ The grandmotherly rat is right to be nervous. A poolside kiss is ‘like a delicious, sodden punch in the mouth’. A drunk at a highway motel is ‘giving off a swampy odour, like leaves in a drain’. These unexpected, apposite similes surface in stories with equally unexpected plotlines, and plot and simile turn, always, toward the sombre or alarming. There is a tribute to earlier noir writing: Womersley parodies Raymond Chandler in the junkie stories: ‘The kettle had recently boiled and steam was bleeding down the window pane. It was winter. It had been winter for years.’ But no Philip Marlowe appears with a view to solving a crime. The crimes described here are too pervasive for any detective – they are crimes of callousness and inaction.

A Lovely and Terrible Thing is a collection of taut, dark-edged, and very successful stories. Chris Womersley’s novels have a well-deserved following, and this transition to short fiction will add to his readership and acclaim.