In a collection of short stories, creating a portrait of a community – almost as if it were a character itself – can be the whole point. In Kelly Cooper’s first book, all 17 stories are set in Eyehill, “a town of about a hundred and twenty with no bank, no hospital, no high school.” We hear of Rhea’s unrequited love for Jarvis, Roland Lafonde’s child being attacked by his brother’s dog, Beryl running off with a hotel guest and ending up a waitress. In all, we’re introduced to what amounts to about a fifth of the town, some characters appearing in multiple stories while others linger in the background. Patterns emerge in this town’s slow transformation: women become more interested in education and independence; the farmers’ livelihood is threatened by oil companies.

Eyehill runs into one of the dangers with this type of mosaic structure, that the stories fail to stand by themselves. Leaning too much on the whole, they often feel like incomplete sketches halted just before the climax. Similarly, many of the characters are flat, and feel as if they’re standing in for typical small-town figures. Suzy Saretsky, the girl with whom the men cheat on their wives, is predictably big-breasted and uneducated. Elsewhere, a man threatens to throw himself off the grain elevator because his land is being foreclosed by the bank.

There are, however, a couple of gems here. In “Very Little Blood,” a man shamed and cuckolded in front of the whole town moves into a smaller house in the shadow of his own. Driven by the action at hand, not drowned out by the romanticizing of small-town folk, and brought to a surprising conclusion, the story proves Cooper’s ability to draw unique characters and create a complex world of her own.