The drama of Bluebeard, the original fatal husband, turns mainly upon a locked door. After bringing his bride to his castle of dangerously explorable rooms, he points out the locked one and hands her the key — which she is under no circumstances permitted to use. Consumed by her need to know, which his prohibition has only heightened, she unlocks the forbidden door — and suffers the consequences. Granted, each party bears some responsibility for this crime, but the interior design is really the sine qua non. A locked door creates a void that the imagination rushes to fill. In Fabrications Pamela Painter investigates the possibilities of such perilous spaces in thirty-one finely wrought stories, most of them published in several collections over the past three and half decades.

Perhaps inevitably, the locked door also evokes powerful scenes from childhood — the closing away of parental sexuality, not to mention other joint decisions equally inexplicable from the child’s point of view. The parents who populate these stories are inveterate liars who are keenly aware of the extent to which the kids swallow their propaganda. In “New Family Car,” a divorced mother is home with her teenage daughter on a snow day. Steffie invites some friends over for pizza and then divulges a secret: after divorcing her father, Steffie’s mother cut him out of the photographs in the family album. Overhearing this, her mother complains,” I don’t like my life paraded around in front of a bunch of kids.” Steffie retorts: “You forget. It’s my life, too.” Her mother attempts to reason with her:

‘You think you’d be better off if your father and I stayed together.’

‘What’s the matter with that?’ Steffie says, pulling back and glaring.

‘Because it wouldn’t be true.’

That’s a bit rich coming from the cropper of family photographs. Poignantly, Steffie has saved the scraps. Confronted by this evidence, Steffie’s mother attempts to conciliate. But before she can finish a sentence, Steffie interrupts with a fabrication of her own. ”You’re right,” she admits, not wholly convincingly. “It’s better this way.” In this way Steffie is initiated into the liars’ club known as adulthood.

Some doors that seem locked are merely closed. There is, for instance, the metaphorical door at the early stage of a career that it’s necessary to get one’s foot into, the threshold that, once crossed, permits the beginning of a life’s work. It’s surely no accident that of the earliest stories in the collection, “The Next Time I Meet Buddy Rich,” allegorizes this rite of passage. Tony, an up-and-coming drummer whom success has eluded, opens for his idol, Buddy Rich, in an out-of-the-way venue in Erie, Pennsylvania. Before the show begins, Tony makes fumbling conversation with Rich, who shares a nugget of quasi-wisdom before denigrating his fans, the venue, and the music business. For Tony, this is as good an initiation as any: “I suddenly had a feeling for what Buddy Rich had to deal with, wanting to be liked and understood and yet running into people who kill off any generosity you feel for the public out there.” That last sneering phrase marks an important shift: Tony’s in. He has arrived.

As Tony’s transformation suggests, Painter’s doors open onto ambiguity; no blessing is unmixed. This can be funny. In “Doors,” Bluebeard is reimagined as a woman whose anodyne later-life hobbies — gardening, event planning, volunteering — don’t quite conceal her menacing edge. Like Bluebeard, she has a sinister aspect and keys to many doors. When her husband proposes downsizing to a condominium, she takes her revenge by progressively locking him out of the rooms of the family home. In “Brochures,” another man is similarly surprised by his wife. After years spent comfortably denigrating his wife’s interests, he is initiated into the sheer fact of her inner life, separate from him and over which he has no control, just at the moment that he feels her hands pushing him firmly off the edge of a cliff.

But crossing a threshold rarely yields such a clear triumph or defeat. Outcomes can be more varied — and more surprising. In the Buddy Rich story, Tony’s star rises, but at a cost. Fresh anxieties torment him. He who once worried about never making it now frets about the youngsters coming next. But he has won something, too: the privilege of a particular kind of life. He gets on stage: “It was my night. I heard the voices in the club lose their timbre, saw heads turn. There was no going back to Erie, only nights like these to keep me whole.”

Like Bluebeard’s castle, fiction is also a dangerous place for the innocent. Painter is an especially sharp satirist of self-satisfied readers and the equally complacent writers they admire, whose narrow preoccupations mirror their own. In “Hitchhikers,” two literary-minded widows hit the road, hoping the trip will help them decide whether to buy a house together. They pick up two hitchhiking women whose relationship is as ambiguous as their own. When the hitchhikers threaten to expose the primary pair’s unacknowledged bigotries of sex and class, Marcy and Paige abruptly abandon them. On the road again, they retreat into a self-congratulatory bubble while playing an audiobook of stories by John Cheever, about whose limitations Painter has no illusions. “Paige recalled the day’s expansive feeling of appreciating the newly empty back seat, of honoring a friendship that had endured, and finally driving the remaining miles to New Orleans companionably listening to Cheever’s sad narrators,” so like themselves, whose shortcomings Cheever softens down to “suburban misdemeanors and mild vice.”

But Painter is too wise an artist to conclude that every fabrication, literary or not, must be damaging. Some are downright necessary. Painter’s genius for subversion, for skewering her characters with their own self-serving lies and denials, is balanced by awareness of the vulnerabilities that can make reality so hard to bear. Suicides and overdoses abound in Fabrications, and Painter’s main characters are often standing at death’s door just when it slams shut behind someone else. To survive they become master fabricators, weaving tapestries of solacing half- and near-truths, which Painter relays with tender precision. At times such solace even takes an overtly literary form, as when a dying man’s wife reads a novel he has always loved, and the intimacy of this literary encounter extends the life of their relationship beyond his death. Like the volume as a whole, the result is an argument for literature as a vital and necessary stay against unbearable loss.

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Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of four short story collections including Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere; she is the recipient of grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the co-author, with Anne Bernays, of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. She teaches in the Emerson College MFA program.

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Diane Josefowicz is co-editor of reviews at Necessary Fiction.