The two delinquent musicians in “Geraldine Loves” are longtime friends who have relocated to New Orleans to escape the stagnation of their native Idaho where, the narrator admits, “to pass the time, you made things up.” He and Beebo begin receiving a finger-written message on their grimy truck after each sorry gig, Geraldine Loves _______, and the allure of this unknown woman becomes a fixture in the life of a man who is trying desperately to outrun ennui, to determine what he wants from an uncertain world that has promised him nothing. “Our hopes rarely achieve form… our wishes typically remain just that.” The young men will return home to Idaho because that’s what failures do after witnessing too much wretchedness and disappointment on the road. This is no mere buddy story à la Kerouac; the sympathy Morris shows these two characters is outdone only by the sympathy they show each other.

The centerpiece of the collection, “The Children of Dead State Troopers,” owes much to Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”; both stories contain mysterious, unwanted phone calls and imminent death; both peddle a sorrow that never lapses into bathos. Randall Moon is putting a puzzle together with his son to distract himself from the fact that his wife is at a doctor’s office being diagnosed with a brain tumor. Persistent calls from a creepy state trooper asking for a donation force...