In “The Plastic Garden,” the opening story of Ottawa author Christian McPherson’s debut collection Six Ways to Sunday, a reclusive model-maker finds emotional fulfillment in crafting tiny animals for a young neighbour. When the creatures are smashed by a pack of skater-boys, the model-maker snaps, furiously beating one boy’s skull against the street. This moment establishes the pattern of the remaining 11 stories: the destruction of something small leads to violence, insanity, and suffering.

McPherson’s stories shun twists and surprises. He narrows his fictional scope and boils down the prose to its bare essentials, leaving behind spare, mechanical stories that only periodically succeed in offering enough detail to humanize his crew of seedy characters.

The longest installments are the strongest, including the title story, in which the lives of three low-income tavern dwellers are revealed over the course of a single beer-fuelled night. The slow pacing, the unadorned prose, and the space McPherson affords himself all pay off; the characters are sufficiently revealed for the reader to extrapolate on their fates.

Unfortunately, such examples are rare. In the shorter stories, McPherson often resorts to cliché instead of nuance: young drug dealers get in over their heads; a criminal father steals in order to show his son a little love. Sirens always seem to be approaching, and, of course, the sleazy types all have hearts of gold. Most of the stories come to a halt very suddenly and ambiguously, with endings that do not ring true. They don’t exactly ring false, either. They don’t do much of anything.

And this is the central flaw of Six Ways to Sunday. The stories rely on the readers to fill in gaps, but give them little to work with. Whole lives can be presented in miniature, but to do so requires a subtlety absent from these earnest, but ultimately formulaic, stories.