“Welcome to adulthood, where all your parts are fake or broken and you get sore on certain evenings.” So says a father to his son in the story “So Long, Anyway,” from Somerville’s appropriately titled debut collection, and it’s a fitting sentiment for all of the stories here, not just the ones about adolescence. In one of several standouts, called “Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow,” Somerville depicts an angry middle-aged man hoping to resuscitate his failed career in “pressurized and spray-on cheeses,” who instead, for the price of $5, learns from a stranger how to kill using only his hands, in a manner promised to go undetected. When he subsequently kills a man and accidentally deathblows his own foot, he puts an end to his career in cheeses altogether and returns to his family with little to offer his son besides the accursed deathblow technique.

All of these stories have a subtle undercurrent of brutality, with recurring images of blood, cold, snow, and in more than one story, knocked-out teeth. The writing is consistently sharp, direct and often darkly funny, and there’s not a clunker in the bunch. But these aren’t your typical teenage scenarios—you know, the variety where some sort of growing up or learning takes place. Most of the time, if anyone learns anything, it’s nothing good.

—Elizabeth Crane