Great expectations are handsomely realized in five debut short-story collections FIRST COLLECTIONS of short fiction inspire in this reader equal amounts of dread and anticipation. Faced with five such collections, one had better be blessed with ample curiosity to finish the task. But I am curious about these new houses on the literary block. For here might be a builder destined to succeed, here another tottering between the void and distinction; here one who mercifully will go gently and seek another trade. Dayv James-French, who has already won places in both Coming Attractions and the Macmillan Anthology, is saddled with the greatest expectations of the lot. It struck me that Victims of Gravity is also the handsomest book of the five, fronted on the cover by a Colville print - Cat and Artist - and in all ways nicely presented. I picked it up first. Inside are 11 stories that gather moments, conversations, attitudes, and dreams in the lives of mostly young male characters. Lives do not unfold by event; instead, small details are studied under a magnifying glass. Out of all this considering and pondering, the author forges a tension that is occasionally relieved by humour, some of it broad a sister vomiting on her brother`s head in one story, stoned men "scarfing down" "Cheez Doodles" in another. Perhaps by design, a distance is created between the reader and these characters. The dialogue, the pacing, seem vaguely unreal. These victims of gravity aspire to slip their earthly bonds - an unsuitable marriage, the death of a father, growing pains. The stories seem filmic in the way they move: indeed, films and television programs figure prominently. The eye of the narrator is a slow, cold, discerning eye; the writing a trifle self-conscious. And yet the stories are sophisticated and the metaphysical musings of the author and his intense characters manage some lasting power. A young man in "Ground Cover" is asked to consider the possibility that the landowners in The Grapes of Wrath were not necessarily evil, but just ordinary folk bent on survival. He replies: "When you`re attacked by a wild animal, you don`t worry about whether or not it`s trying to feed its young" But if Victims of Gravity is as modern in its architecture as a Raymond Moriyama tower, Wishbone, by Reg Silvester, is as cute as an English cottage. Cliff and Kay Condon, married hotel keepers in Wildale, Alberta, whose much admired romance produced four children before cooling off, are forced to sleep together in 1968 when a winter blizzard fills the hotel with guests. A party ensues; some of the guests grab their musical instruments and play into the night. Much later in this book (actually a neat collection of short stories and a novella strung together like pearls on a line), there is a reunion to mark the anniversary. And as happened after the first party, there is a kind of miracle birth following the second. The former had produced Walter Condon, a magical little boy who for a time at least had a "wishbone` on the end of one rib that enabled him to will his wishes into existence. The second produces a Christ-like creature known as Little Daughter, and it seems she will save the world. Silvester has concocted an engaging form here: part parable, part magic realism, part anatomy of a small town. If there is a tiny bit of Sandra Birdsell and W. P. Kinsella here, and there is, it has been turned upside down and rattled inside a shaker. Silvester`s endearing family saga is as silly as it is wise. I liked the Condon family. I liked Chester and Lester, the latter a locksmith who becomes embroiled in domestic violence and who fantasizes that his truck is equipped with a loudspeaker, enabling him to berate both the wife-beating husband and the neighbours who fail to intervene. "You don`t let weeds grow on your lawns!" Lester would have cried. "Why do you let violence grow on this street?" I laughed out loud at a Wildale local who was asked during the blizzardinspired party if he was stuck here too: "Yup, all my life," he replied. I laughed again when Lester broke his crackers into his soup, and his date, a nurse, admonished him, "Was that really necessary ?" The sense of marvellous restraint that marks the whole unravels at the end, but I still recommend this tender little book. Remember the name Terry Griggs. You will hear it again. The author of Quickening already possesses an arrestingly sensuous style. Her publisher would have us believe that Griggs`s stories "crackle with energy and convince us that were in the presence of tremendous talent. The stories are eccentric, wildly inventive, whimsical, sometimes fantastical .... "The publisher, one might argue, understates the case. At times, the author of the 16 stories in this collection comes perilously close to the edge of excess. I was seduced by the haunting lyricism of these tales - many of them preoccupied with death by drowning and ghosts and dark myths, and many of them leavened with humour. "Her Toes" is told from the vantage point of a toddler who, in the course of the story, eats or drinks what comes his way: a half-eaten sandwich, a wad of hard, pink gum, a glass of watery rye ("both excellent," the wee man pronounces), a pickle dressed in dog hair, two buttons, a shoelace, some spider webs "that were like cotton candy," and a dead bee. Griggs manages to tell wild tales, but tell them with such clarity and authority that they seem true. A character in one story claims to know a verse in the Bible that, if spoken backwards, stops a cut from bleeding, "Public Mischief` is a small masterpiece about four daughters in charge of four quite different hotels in one town. Of one daughter, Griggs writes: Lucille`s envisioned future contained palm trees, casinos, slinky black dresses, heat, and motion. Mink slipped off her shoulder, silk slithered up her leg, strangers` hands rode the whole length of her body. It was life lived on the edge, on the wing, in the element of excitement, perpetually unfolding. She would gamble everything. Even her skin. There are shades of Eric McCormack, Paul Quarrington, and Michael Ondaatje here, but certainly Griggs is her own writer, too. I am not sure that in these stories she tackles subjects worthy of her talent, but what a quirky and catholic talent it is. Griggs is a writer worth watching, a builder of strange and wondrous castles. There is nothing fancy about the house of horrors that Kenneth J. Harvey has built with Directions for an Opened Body. The prose is raw and possesses terrific power. Few writers in this country speak for the dispossessed and those others on the fringe - ex-cons, the wretchedly poor, the wives and children of bikers, the ever so slightly or positively mad. Without sentimentality and without preaching, Harvey offers Them to Us, occasionally merging the two constituencies for effect. In the first story, for example, a violent man sees his wife leave his ransacked home one minute and would-be buyers from the decent class tour it the next. In this underworld, men and women rely on potato chips, watch too much TV, act on their anger. They walk half a mile to save 12 cents on a loaf of bread. They would kill a swan in a park to stave off hunger. The menace in their eyes is as much real as imagined. "Words forsake the stricken," the author says in the last story, Their tongues are not tamed by the manners of privileged education. What they have are bodies .... Warm, soiled bodies; wiry and strangely agile, or plump and pasty from ingesting empty food. They stand in sparsely finished rooms that stink of rot. Even babies are in limbo, "somewhere between brittle happiness and damnation` Finally, there is Mahoney in Control and Other Stories, by David Munroe. Here are characters with a fortress mentality, moved about somewhat heavy-handedly by an imaginative young author who may yet learn subtlety. Typical is the title story in which a cab driver exacts revenge on a bank manager who fails to recognize the client he has just that day denied a loan. The banker is late for a flight; the cabbie will delight in making him miss it. Or "Marathon Man" - about an agoraphobic fatso who runs marathons in his apartment. Both are tidy little tales with surprise endings. The stories have the flavour of scripts in the old "Twilight Zone" television series. In one story, a string of suicides in an apartment complex turns out to be a series of murders, and the discoverer of this truth becomes both judge and jury to the killer. Revenge emerges as a minor theme; the menace of violence -from dirfters, from pederasts, from movers hangs heavy over the proceedings. Plot and snappy endings suffocate mood and character, although a story called "Holding On," about a wife undone by a dinner party, is a pleasing departure from the formula. In the main, these five collections of short fiction offered more surprise than disappointment. Decent shelters, all.