GOOD AS ANY

This bleak, powerful collection of eight short stories chronicles the lives of diseased and depressed men and women trying to make their way through an unsympathetic world. Though Westmoreland's spare, elegant and highly textural prose provides some relief, the sadness that permeates almost every one of these stories can be overwhelming. The writer captures his characters' wrenching existences in precise detail, and the aftertaste is rarely one of hope. Among the strongest offerings is the poignant "They Have Numbered All My Bones," about a lonely man recalling lost love while on his deathbed following a car crash. Also of note are several entries in which diabetes darkens and distorts the lives of the main characters. A lifetime of fighting the disease has so numbed the emotions of a young man in "The Buried Boy" that he ignores the pleas of a teenager drowning on the beach. "Blood Knot" tracks the sudden disintegration of a middle-aged man who slips into diabetic delirium while on a fly-fishing trip. The collection's title story offers the only trace of levity, capturing moments of dark humor and tenderness as a man tries to save the life of his beloved dog. Despite the collection's strengths, many of the stories suffer from endings that are unnecessarily oblique, and Westmoreland's prose at times strains under the weight of sensory overload. Both problems mar the otherwise exceptional novella-length "Winter Island," which describes how economic and social pressures set the peculiar inhabitants of a remote New England valley against each other. For readers not discouraged by unrelenting woe, Westmoreland's fiction debut offers many incisive observations about life, suffering and death. Agent, Anna Ghosh. 7-city author tour. (Jan.)