Ottessa Moshfegh’s dark, confident, prickling stories are mostly about youngish men and women who have taken a wrong turn somewhere and find themselves hunkering down in nowhere towns, dismal cabins, shabby apartments. Like the photographer Diane Arbus, Moshfegh lights things from below. Psychologically, you don’t see well-set dinner tables in her fiction. You see the chewed gum and crusted snot stuck to the table’s underside, the run in the hostess’s stocking. There is a good deal of pus, acne, scarring and vomit. The transgressive sex in her stories can put you in mind of Mary Gaitskill. Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter. But this writer’s voice is entirely her own. The humor here is wild, modern and unnerving, like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood. — Dwight Garner