Ami Sands Brodoff is not afraid of blood and guts imagery or the narrative intricacy that her characters’ densely packed psyches seem to demand. In these 12 ambitious stories, Brodoff probes and prods our most instinctive attractions and connections. The bloodknots of the title come in all types and textures: they are the ties that bind family members; the body’s and the mind’s perennial tangling and unravelling; and the messy viscera that accompany birth, sex, and death. Some of the stories here delve into a child’s catalogue of torments and fantasies, while others recall childhood’s vulnerability and intensity from a more adult, distanced perspective.

“The Jewish Giant” is particularly eerie and wonderful. A first-person account of an orphaned boy who is tortured at boarding school for his abnormally large size and obsession with tiny finger puppets dubbed the Bloodkin, the tale’s strangely stilted narration creates a mesmerizing effect even as it barrels toward tragedy.

Brodoff also excels at capturing a mother’s complicated anticipation and mounting ambivalence around an impending birth. Her depictions of childbirth (and various other breaks in reality) are often rhythmic and colourful. A baby is “still spotty and scurf-scalped, skin peely as bark,” while a woman desperate to see her long-lost lover and father of her child has a voice “yearning and childlike, thinned to a question mark.”

An otherwise excellent story like “Green Avalanche,” which culminates in a birth, suffers from Brodoff’s baroque tendencies. The slow and subtle layering of event and character here gets painted over by too broad (and bloody) a descriptive brush.

In fact, the force of Bloodknots lies not in Brodoff’s frequent bouts of description, but in her ability to cobble character through flashback and dialogue. Most of these stories are rife with episodes of meaningful recollection used to good effect. Nowhere is this more gracefully accomplished than in “Soul Name,” in which a Holocaust survivor and her daughter stagger under the weight of memory, with the past revealed only in remnants woven delicately and deftly into the narrative of the women’s everyday lives.