[Three] of the stories in Black Tickets, are perceptive renderings of subdued middle-class problems in suburban settings—conflicts between generations…. Several others represent good period or regional pieces (time: 1934; place: Anytown, Down South). Most of the balance are scraped from the urban underbelly: pimps, hookers, junkies, murderers, loners, losers, many of them young, in brittle episodes of despair and violence and sex. The writing, streetwise and staccato, hustles along from one startling image to the next. The shock effect wears thin quickly, and these stories reduce to masochistic exercises in negative capability—raising an effective barrier of mannered ugliness to screen or challenge her audience….

To expect consistency in a collection of one author's work is not unreasonable, but Black Tickets strikes me as an intentional display of range and virtuosity, from which one takes the good with the unlikable and, filing away the author's name for future...