It is the year I bring Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving.”) and a potentially festive, ultimately sad premise (Dylan comes to dinner before your brother goes to Iraq). This theme continues in “North Of,” a story that has brilliant opening lines (“There are American flags on school windows, on cars, on porch swings. the bathtub is in the driveway, the sink is on the porch.” On the way to this stark picture of a home destroyed from within, Bertino mixes in references to icons of quotidian American entertainment - Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Brown - and so prepares us for the way her stories function: as combinations of rough sandpaper and its smooth result. The collection begins with “Free Ham,” a house-fire story that ends with an image short story buffs might recognize as an homage to Raymond Carver’s story “Why Don’t You Dance?” :“everything that is supposed to be inside is outside.

In the case of Bertino’s debut collection, they send us into the sometimes surreal but always convincing world of skillfully drawn plots, complex metaphors, and quirky-serious wordplay. But allusions, in good hands, send us forward, not back into something we already know.

This type of pleasure can be dangerous, because it comes freighted with the potential for self-congratulation it threatens to insulate the audience along with the author. Marie-Helene Bertino’s Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning story collection, Safe as Houses, offers, among many pleasures, the readerly pleasure of allusions both cultural and literary.

Safe as Houses by Marie-Helene Bertino