The 15 short stories in Lise Bissonette’s Cruelties are neither easy to understand nor easy to take in. For example, in the opening story, “The Slain Women,” a contractor turns from building towers to killing young women by mystically injecting his seed into their bodies, turning them to concrete. (Or so I think, after reading it three times.)

“The Knife” starts with an epigraph: “If I cross my legs / says the woman he desires / You’ll need a knife / Your hands will be cold / And I won’t come.” By the end the reader isn’t sure how to take that and wonders: has the high school math teacher selected this pretty young bank teller for marriage, sex, or slaughter?

Taken together these brief stories are engrossing, piling up one shocking image after another. They also show a side of Bissonette that may surprise those who only know her as the austere-looking publisher of the influential Montreal daily Le Devoir. During her tenure she pulled the newspaper back from the brink of bankruptcy into seeming financial health while expounding closely reasoned analyses of Quebec and Canadian politics. She has just left that position to become director general of Quebec’s new mega-library, the Grande Bibliothèque.

There is far more to the woman than her business and intellectual sides. The stories are dedicated to her conjoint, Godefroy-M. Cardinal, an art historian and important figure in the Quebec art scene. Two of the stories, in fact, demonstrate the power of art. “The Chains” and “The Lovers” are both centred on drawings in red chalk: one, a self-portrait of a young woman; the other, of particularly lovely female genitalia.

Bissonette has published two novels previously. Her first, Following the Summer, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1992. It was a dense, beautifully written story that took place in the Abitibi region, where Bissonnette is from. Some of the same stark landscape and isolation show up in these stories, but none of them go as far with the material as did the novel. A pity: I would love to see Bissonnette take the situations she sketches here and push them into longer narratives.