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The thirteen provocative stories in A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, Darryl Whetter’s first collection, offer lots of sex, a bit of violence, and a wickedly clever exploration of human nature.

Backed into emotional corners, Darryl Whetter’s men are creatures of feckless energy and intermittent idealism. Their fragile relationships break up easily, and men who don’t retreat into pot-fuelled lethargy revert to ambitious self-destruction. Excellent as he is at capturing his characters’ essence, Darryl Whetter is mature enough to view the men in particular, but also the women, with considerable irony. Whetter’s “heroes” are often men in their twenties or thirties, men with little self-knowledge but boundless self-centredness and sexual appetite.

The event that propels several stories is the break-up of a marriage, a love affair, or a liaison of convenience. When separation doesn’t inspire pot-induced lethargy, it goads these men to frenzy. Backed into emotional corners, they revert to self-destruction. Sometimes, as in the hilarious “Profanity Issues,” valiantly suppressed rage, shame, and terror erupt at a weird angle, and blind loyalty to an impulsive misjudgement snowballs into weeks of public humiliation. “Non-Violent, Not OK” is an insider’s view of the 2001 Quebec City riot. The central character, Chuck, is encouraged in an abstract sort of way by his lazily liberal prof, equipped by a father who thinks money fixes everything, and armed with pop-psych instructions from a bloodless riot manager. Innocent of ideology, he wanders aimlessly around in the tear gas, offering his Maalox-based eye-spray to friend and foe alike. In “A Sharp Tooth in the Fur,” an ex-couple acts out a highly original sexual fantasy that’s as hilarious as it is shocking. From the classroom to the laundromat, from Paris to the mosquito-infested Ontario bush, Whetter dissects a portion of human experience that has never been so deftly explored, revealing the psyche of the 20-something male.

At age 41, Eddy is in existential extremis. He once had an enviable life—a wife he adored, a young son, a cozy suburban house surrounded by carefully planted and sculpted gardens, the luxury to pursue his passion and become a professional horticulturalist. Now he’s separated from his wife, estranged from his son, he’s let his garden grow wild—like the rest of his life, it’s totally out of control. When his son, Maxime, tired of being embarrassed by his father’s dilapidated house, his garden gone to seed and his old beater of a car, decides to leave home and live with his cool, professional mother—who immediately demands twice the alimony—Eddy goes on a rampage, smashing his son’s furniture and hurtling it and his possessions through windows he neglects to open first. Ending up in the hospital, the doctor diagnoses “a slight case of fatigue.”

As Eddy plunges deeper into despair, insomnia and self-destruction, frantically searching for a way to live an authentic life, punching out his boss and finally threatening his best friend with a gun, the narrative voice of the novel changes, and we begin to see Eddy, his parents, his childhood and his past loves through the eyes of his wife, friends and companions.

Stéphane Bourguignon, the creator of the much-loved television series La vie, la vie, about a group of 30-somethings in Montreal, has said that he wanted this book to look at the darker side of life. Written like a surrealist Camus on steroids, in multiple voices, with an uncanny eye and ear for graphic physicality and keen psychological insight, Bourguignon’s examination of relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, past wounds and present possibilities is filled with a raucous warmth and humanity—but it is also intensely, darkly and almost unbearably humorous.

This atmospheric coming-of-age tale follows Ben, a sensitive boy struggling to unravel his family history while caught in the vortex of other people’s lives.

Vancouver Island, 1875. Three-year-old Ben comes to live with Agda and her volatile husband James in their small wilderness cabin. Entranced by the lushly overarching rainforest, he helps his loving adoptive mere in the garden, learns his letters at the kitchen table and wonders what it would be like to go to school. When James takes Ben, age nine, on a whisky run, the boy is plunged into the rough world of a ramshackle coastal city. Left alone in a canoe he can barely paddle, he is saved from drowning by a man who is later found dead in the same sea. The frightened boy waits for James to reappear while in the care of James’s sweet but listless niece Lily. When James and Ben return to the cabin, they find Agda injured and limping badly. In a few days, Agda is dead. And grieving Ben suspects James of being involved in both sudden deaths.

The nearby Stenhouse farm becomes Ben’s refuge, where he helps with chores and grows up alongside their lively children, including spiky, truth-telling Effie. When James dies, seventeen-year-old Ben is offered a home there as the hired man. First, though, he makes the wilderness trek to the city, to give Lily a bequest from James. With the encroaching rainforest and the sea always ready to reclaim the poor streets and crude dwellings of the tumultuous city, Ben gets hopelessly entangled with Lily and other new friends.

The longer Ben stays, the more he learns about his birth mother — and the farther he is from the Stenhouse farm. Only when he knows who he really is, and frees himself from everyone else’s plans for him, can he act on his own desires and claim his place in the world.