In ‘Bliss’ stories, angst and empathy

In “Mountains of the Moon,’’ a couple recovering from the disappearance of their child seek new experiences to divert from their grief, only to inadvertently stumble upon a sight that causes one of them to relive the loss. It’s technically wonderful and painfully real. It’s also astonishingly short, considering how well you feel you know the characters when you’ve finished.

In “Physical Wisdom,’’ a 16-year-old boy who’s just moved with his parents from Chicago to California suffers from a phobia of sleeping indoors after he experiences his first earthquake. I can’t remember when I last read a short story that captured so well the meanness, insecurity, and outright helplessness one experiences as an adolescent.

These stories are infused with a profound empathy. It’s one of Gilley’s great strengths that he can take youthful fears, the death of one’s parents, and unrequited love and treat them with equal respect. And that’s really the defining characteristic of the sort of loneliness he explores: There’s no one to put things in perspective. There’s just you and your own personal hell.

In many of these stories the internal loneliness of the characters is paired with a consciousness of the natural world that borders on the poetic. One piece begins: “Pasture and field in high-autumn shades of bruised red and yellow, aroma of horse-apples and hay, sweetness of harvest and rot.’’ Reality is heightened, and these internally focused characters are grounded in a world we can almost feel and see.

Possibly the most successful of these stories is “White,’’ in which a woman walks out on her boyfriend in a baseball field parking lot. As a result they both take short journeys, literal and metaphorical, that are just long enough to make them examine the neuroses and deceptions that plague their relationship and find their way back to each other. Elsewhere in this collection, Gilley’s prose is gorgeous and lyrical, but in “White’’ it’s more spare, with a palpable physicality that grabs the reader from the first sentence: “Without thinking, she hit him.’’

The runner-up for best in this collection is “All Hallows’ Eve’’ in which we encounter the barely veiled snobberies and relationship complexities of contemporary America filtered through the consciousness of a Cambodian immigrant.

Gilley’s prose is often wonderful but not always appropriate for his characters. Call me a snob, but I have a hard time believing that the janitor who narrates the title story would really describe the face of the woman he loves as glowing like “the lambent brightness of a candle’s flame.’’ I also found it jarring when the teen narrator of “The End Zone’’ described his uncle as having “a habit of slipping into your peripheral vision’’ a phrase that by its vocabulary and tone simply didn’t match his voice in the rest of the story.

But these minor complaints aside, “Bliss and Other Stories’’ is a great collection by a gifted writer.

Kevin O’Kelly reviews for the Globe and blogs at notesandcomments1.blogspot.com.