Divided Souls

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The doctor in the title story of Chris Adrian's new collection, A Better Angel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 227 pages), is a junkie and a cheat, but that's not his biggest problem. His biggest problem is that since first grade, he's been hectored by an angel who expects him to save the world, and he can't even save his dying father.

A pediatrician by day, Adrian knows kids inside and out, and his vision of childhood is the opposite of idyllic. In Stab, a bereaved twin, mourning the loss of his brother to cancer, refuses to speak for two years; his silence is just one strand in a macabre tale that twists grief into brutality. Three of the stories grapple with 9/11 through children's eyes. Here Adrian is uneven, but he reimagines the trauma of the event in ways both fresh and full of horror.

Adrian's language is powered by unflinching detail (a dead man's open eyes have "the look of spoiling grapes"), and he's at his best when in the sickroom, as in The Sum of Our Parts, in which a comatose soul trails the living around the hospital where her body lies dying. The title story, which combines dark comedy and deep pathos, is not only the standout of this volume but also one of the best stories published in recent memory. Adrian has been known as a writer's writer, but with this book, readers would do well to stake their claim.