All right, so this is hardly a recent release, but there are a couple of reasons worth including it in this survey of new product. First, it’s just terrific: a collection of graphic short stories by Koren Shadmi that are effortlessly incisive; and by “graphic,” I mean that these are ten 10-20 page comics collected as a Villard original, not that the sex portrayed is explicit. Sure, there is nudity throughout, but the sex here is not the be-all and end-all. Rather, for Shadmi sex (and our inevitable anxiety about it) is a portal into deeper levels of emotions and states of being that having nothing to do with erotic stimulation: alienation, loneliness, anger, bitterness, compulsion, and good ol’ sickness unto death. Which bring me to the second reason this title is worth mentioning—all the works included here, no matter how “dark,” start with sex as a given. So, in a sense, do the stories of In the Flesh, but they also interrogate, consistently and painfully, why sex enjoys that privilege as well as the psychological consequences of assigning it this status.

What does it mean to be desired? What does it mean not to desired? These are the kind of questions that Shadmi wrestles with, but of course he does so with an artistry to which my reductive and dry phrasing of these issues can never do justice.

Overall, the book has the feel of a really good indie anthology film. The opening story, “The Fun Lawn,” about the love life of a kids’ TV show mascot, is one of the most narratively developed of the stories, along with the more irreal “The Radioactive Girlfriend.” Many of the other stories are practically too blunt and brief to be called stories. They may be structured as such, but they are more about concept, tone, and creating an emotional frisson than spinning a yarn. Two of the more startling stories, both visually and conceptually, “Antoinette” and “A Date,” both use the notion of isolating desire by deconstructing the body itself. In the first case, through a title character whose head is detached from her body; in the second, through a hook-up between characters wearing paper bags on their heads. This visual device is so effective that you can’t blame Shadmi for doing a kind of theme-and-variations with it over the course of In the Flesh.The idea of a mask is present as early as “The Fun Lawn,” with its oversized dog costume. Later, in the more overtly surreal “A Lavish Affair” a character dons a gruesome mask in stark contrast to her attractive body. By using such images it’s as if Shadmi wants to pinpoint the precise moment that attraction occurs—or disintegrates.

In all these cases, as well as in the simple but brutally honest “What is Wrong with Me?,” Shadmi explores the notion of what makes people long for each other… and are they even aware of the full effect they have on others? Beyond bleak, these tales have been criticized for having a one-note approach to romantic love, namely despair and cynicism (all right, maybe that’s two notes). But to me the voice is authentic, the themes are deeply felt, and the storylines quite imaginative. So I wouldn't dream of asking Shadmi to include a couple of upbeat love stories in this collection any more than I would have requested the same of Raymond Carver.

“What is Wrong with Me?,” for example, is as biting and honest as a Mary Gaitskill short story. But it also uses the graphic format to alternate points-of-view during the day after a one-night stand in a way that prose fiction would be hard to match. What’s especially neat about the story is that you could reverse the gender of the two main characters and it would still resonate. And such an approach is largely true of the entire book: there are no gender axes to grind here—Shadmi presents desire and the actions we take based upon it as an eternal war, the kind where both sides suffer equally. Perhaps that's why his characters are alternately bug-eyed or heavy-lidded, as if life is either shocking them or exhausting them.

As the collection progresses, the content becomes both more horrific and more experimental, the latter to mixed results. In “Grandpa Minolta,” a family member has been, um, saving up images of his granddaughter. Oh, and “Satisfaction Av.” starts with a young girl biting the head off a rat. And that’s only one of the many stories with the theme of consumption/eating, the most notable of which is crazily Freudian “Pastry Paradise.” The more experimental stories, “Cruelty” and the dream-narrative “A Lavish Affair,” contain stunning passages, and they speak to Shadmi’s ambitions. And while even at these longer lengths, the storytelling itself reamins lean. Still, the ideas in these stories are more challenging and opaque, and so they may be less satisfying for many readers.