Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, By Wells Tower

Wells Tower's debut volume of short stories is written with that sharp dexterity which, it seems, only American literature can produce, evocative of the pithy scenarios of Jonathan Franzen, Raymond Carver and Annie Proulx. His subject matter is dysfunctional America – nothing new in that, or in his cast of separated couples and abandoned children. But it is Tower's vivid imagery that really impresses: the wife who discovers her husband's infidelity from a female footprint on the inside of his car windscreen; or the American landscape itself, drawn by Tower as "humps of pink granite, which in the harsh red light of morning resembled corned beef hash".

These stories are nearer to David Lynch than dirty realism – nowhere more so than in the tour de force, "On the Show", whose characters, more freakish than the exhibits, meet their fates at a fairground. "Blond to the bone," says one lecherous ride-hopper. "I'd eat her whole damn child just to taste the thing he squeezed out off."

Tower's knack is to leave the reader wanting more, often ending stories up in the air, pregnant with possibilities. Will the two warring brothers, bound by love and hate, ever reconcile their differences? Will the boy with a fungus on his upper lip resembling a miniature hamburger ever find the leopard in the woods?

Only the title story disappoints, as it follows rampaging Vikings on a raid on Lindisfarne, its visceral violence a kind of Dark Age Reservoir Dogs. Tower's wiry pathos works better on modern ground. In "Door in Your Eye", an elderly wheelchair-bound man staying at his daughter's flat mistakes a neighbour's gentlemen callers for a prostitute's clients, only to discover that she's a drug dealer – who sells him his first joint.

These nine uneasy pieces may play out all their power in the initial shock. Nevertheless, I have seldom read such a collection more quickly, or with more enjoyment: a truly brilliant debut.