Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch came out in hardcover in Canada a year ago, and it’s just now being released in the states in paperback by Vintage, and it’s a very, very solid debut collection of short stories. Full disclosure dictates that I have to admit a sort of anxiety about debut collections by young white dudes, just because they are, by and large, pretty dicey affairs. If you keep your ear to the tracks of the publishing houses, it seems like every year there’s a new handful of these dudes and their very well-crafted and interesting collections of stories, and while the stories certainly, in fundamental ways, work, they don’t really shine in any big way. There are, yes, exceptions—think Matthew Klam’s Sam the Cat or Jack Pendarvis’ The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure—but there’s a whole lot of chaff that’s been released and has just, by and large, done nothing.

Thankfully, Smith’s Bang Crunch really doesn’t feel like that sort of book. Is it still in the territory of domestic stuff? Absolutely. Are there stories that, as Chabon so witheringly put it in McSweeney’s way back when, “glisten with epiphanic dew”? Yeah. But are there also stories that feature, say, a woman who ages rapidly and then de-ages just as rapidly, or rabbits that glow in black lights, or a dead husband whose ashes are inside a curling stone? There are.

Smith does a real fine job of balancing the real banal, domestic stuff against the real fraught stuff that makes up the actual felt experience of being alive. That dead husband whose ashes are in a curling stone? He’s in two stories. In one, voiced in first person by his son, the son (named Max) is going through some sexual awakening moments, and they’re all vivid and complex and, in at least one case, moving almost to the point of tears. In the other story the dead man’s in, it’s voiced by his wife, a recovering alcoholic, and there’s too much, plot-wise, to get too into, but the story moves and zings and, over and over, feels.

The title story’s the one about the girl who ages first real rapidly and then de-ages as rapidly, and while it’s incredibly well-written and breakneck in terms of pace and motion the best story in the bunch is the final story, “Jaybird.” Clocking in at just over 60 pages, it’s an absolute stunner of a story—as spacious and rich as a novel (with a few of the pitfalls and dangers that come with novel territory as well: there are moments that feel somewhat repetitive), as movingly dramatic as something cinematic, it’s a story that absolutely anyone interested in short stories should read first quickly and then again, more slowly a second time.

In the best way, Smith’s collection feels slightly reckless, like maybe he really doesn’t give too much of a shit about anyone else besides the people in his stories, and it’s an attitude I very very much hope is contagious and already spreading. There’s probably no more certain way to dull and kill the short story form than the casual, continual New Yorker-ization that’s seemed to creep into the scene, and it’s books like Bang Crunch which, despite whatever small flaws they may possess, will keep the whole damn boat from sinking. Is this the book that everyone will be talking about all spring? Probably not. Should they be? Probably.