The title of Victoria-based Craig Boyko’s debut collection refers to many things, sometimes literally and other times more obliquely: the mandatory darkening of homes and streets during the Blitz; a person passing out due to fear or pain; the world plunging permanently into darkness after a person has gone blind. But despite having winkingly black and white-themed titles such as “White Crows,” “Black Ink,” “In the Dark,” and “The Black Gang,” these stories – which range in setting from Stalinist Russia to anonymous Canadian cities – insist on life’s complexity, with plots that often hinge on duplicity or the vagaries of chance.

It’s a complexity of a kind found only in fiction, however: portentous, laden with metaphoric significance, and too tidy. All revealing an ostensibly meaningless world that is, in fact, overly invested with – overflowing with – meaning.

In “The Black Gang,” a budding Marxist takes a sea voyage with his despised family. His greatest scorn is reserved for his father, “the owner and exploiter of men who built bridges,” and so he retreats repeatedly to his cabin to pen anti-capitalist maxims. After several scenes in which the captain touts the ship’s sturdiness, it’s too apparent that a nasty accident awaits a few pages later, and that our protagonist will face a creed-challenging fate.

Boyko has an affection for mathematics and science, disciplines potent with metaphor, but his stories of obsessive love – “In the Dark” and “The Problem of Pleasure,” for instance – are more compelling for not being so overdetermined. Despite Boyko’s own relative youth (he’s not yet 30), he’s also less successful with adolescent narrators. The children who dominate “Ozy” and “The Mean” feel false, both too wise and not wise enough.

Boyko has been praised for his range – he’s been in the Journey Prize anthology four times, tying with David Bergen for the greatest number of stories included – but here that feels like less an accomplishment than an author repeatedly groping for a voice, uncertain of his own. Blackouts contains echoes of Bradbury, Carver, and Babel, but this is ventriloquism, not style. The result: well-crafted but bloodless tales, and a book that feels, on the whole, unnecessary.