RED ANT HOUSE

Cummins is less circus ringleader than freak-show barker in this debut collection of 12 stories, as she entices patrons to peek at the secret lives and survival skills of the downtrodden and disenchanted. Her dark, offbeat style and ability to make the reader uncomfortable are on full display in the title story, in which two loner neighborhood girls—one scrawny and homely, the other mouthy and mean—form an alliance and plan to strip naked for money. Cummins often perches kids in peril, with unreliable guardians who are as ineffective as the mumbling, rarely seen adults in a Peanuts cartoon. In her more accessible tales, the enemy is visible: Karen, a white girl living with her family on an Indian reservation, is tormented by a Navajo girl, Purple, in "Trapeze." In "Crazy Yellow," unsupervised eight-year-old Pete meets his new neighbor, an off-kilter man who is "not in control of his circumstances." And in "Headhunter," a drunk driver on a steep mountain pass forces Ginny into a dangerous game of chicken. In her more surreal stories, fear is less tangible, lurking somewhere between dream and reality: a supernatural force weighs down on a young brother and sister in "Blue Fly"; a sinister hypnotist begs his client to "give me something you truly value" as he eyes her teenage daughter in "The Hypnotist's Trailer." Cummins doesn't always create convincing alternate universes—her deliberately off-kilter prose sometimes falters and her attempts at interior logic aren't always consistent—but these are mostly clever and entertaining experiments. (Apr.)

Forecast:Cummins already has a readership—several of these stories were originally published in the New Yorker and McSweeney's—and this collection (equipped with a gushing blurb from Dave Eggers) should rally her fans. Author tour.