Safe Places, Kerry Dolan’s debut story collection, explores the oddities of human bonds and longings. Set in various places from the city to the remote countryside, these stories evoke entire worlds. Though their settings vary, human responses — sometimes gentle, other times monstrous — form the heart of this collection. A fundamental aspect of human life provides the central theme: “Sometimes things don’t work out the way you planned.”

In the title story, Hannah sees items of furniture as enemies. Her worries — for instance, that her bookshelves and love-seat are infectious — are inexplicable. Hoping to find understanding, she attends the meetings of the Association for the People Concerned about Toxic Substances (APCATS). After Hannah ditches her kitchen table, she wonders how she is supposed to host Thanksgiving dinner. When her search for a safe table turns futile, an APCATS member sardonically remarks: “You think a couple of tables can do the trick? We have toxins in our water, our food, our mattresses — they’re the very fabric of our daily life.” With this remark, Dolan suggests an irony: Invisible enemies pervade the so-called safe places.

The collection’s opening story, “Hit or Miss,” is about Jenny, her father and boyfriend; all three suffer from inexplicable bad luck. Jenny’s father, for instance, drove a hearse for a funeral home until he was laid off due to insufficient numbers of people dying. The few prospects that arose for him fell through for reasons that remain obscure, eventually becoming myths of perpetual disappointment. Jenny’s boyfriend, Danny, says, “Maybe he wanted to fail. Maybe it’s that simple.” Danny, for his part, has spent a year in a mental hospital and is low-spirited. He confesses, “When I start to feel too happy, I always get the scared feeling that it will go away.”

In “Fortunetellers in Williamsburg,” a young anthropology student, Claire, rents an apartment from a Brooklyn soothsayer, Zelihah. Claire reminds Zelihah of herself “walking in the snow thinking about sad things.” She sees Zelihah, whose husband lives in Turkey with another wife, as someone who needs her protection, but Dolan suggests the need for safety might go both ways. After the visionary Zelihah predicts a change in her life, Claire unexpectedly finds fortune and fortitude.

Dolan’s characters do stretch to build connections and to discover their inner selves, but more often they survive collisions and severances. Their strength comes from ordinary sources. Dolan’s writing embraces the ordinary and drives it into new patterns and arcs. “People from Chicago” features simple and polite people who enjoy pancakes and coffee, hotdogs and baseball; they are not intellectuals of any sort. But they know how to look at things the right way, accepting life as it is while attempting to conciliate its torments. For example: to tackle bitterly cold weather and seventy-mph winds, they equip themselves with a weekend breakfast featuring the most perfect of eggs steamed, amazingly, in an espresso machine.

Dolan even turns her drily comic gaze on academia. In “Those Delusions of Grandeur,” a research student, Marshall, experiences the emptiness of no reception stretched out before him. His dissertation is in the hands of his advisor, a top Renaissance scholar who is also lazy and unreliable. “The truth was — it had taken him a while to catch on to this fact, but now, now it was very obvious that his college professors had sold him down the river.” When he visits his friend, Mark, a software developer, he senses that Mark is far ahead of him “on the life progress chart.” Marshall plods on, “mining the academic ore,” but he feels like a loser in contrast to Mark, who seems to have “done the smart thing” by ending his studies with a Masters degree.

Dolan’s emphasis on plot — on the reversal of fortune — is engaging, but her collection’s success relies on subtler shifts in character. In “A Perfect Day at Riis Park,” awkward teenage girl and her prettier friend take a trip to the beach where they meet a young woman, a photographer. As the girl tries to act cool, the woman’s interest changes the girl’s view of herself and her possibilities._ _Similarly in “Quarters,” a ride offered on a highway in the rain totally alters Patty’s life. She ends up cleaning rooms at the Melting Pot Motel in Las Vegas, where she finds herself stuck with a man who both excites and disappoints her: “It was like crashing a party on another planet. Morty gave me quarters — shiny rolls of quarters — and I rolled the slots and swizzled the drinks at the bar. I couldn’t stop, filling up the quarters and watching the apples and bananas roll by. I lost, I gained, I lost, but still, I kept filling up. It was a thrill. It was chance, it was all of life.”

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