In "There Is No Sadness," one of the best of several very fine stories in Duluth attorney Paul Kilgore's debut collection ("Losing Camille," Black Lawrence Press, 147 pages, $16), a beloved grandfather's decline teaches his grandson life lessons that couldn't be taught in any classroom.

Set in a small town near Lake Mille Lacs in the late 1970s, the story is rich with complex characters and moments that will resonate with anyone who's grown up in a small town in Minnesota. It's a melancholy story, chronicling as it does Grandpa Leo's twilight days and grandson Phil's struggle to come to terms with change and mortality, but it's also studded with unexpected humor, such as that provided by an overenthusiastic handyman named Earl, "seventy and Swedish, excitable and nearly deaf," who responds to every bit of news that makes it "over the moat and into his consciousness" with the exclamation, "What? Nooo!"

Similarly, "Losing Camille," the collection's title story, also narrated by a teenager, moves between gentle humor and dark suspense as it describes the transformation that overcomes Cammy, a shy high school senior who one day is basking in a romance with a handsome high school jock and the next is reeling with the raw despair exclusive to the traumatic loss of first love.

It is not clear until the final page how, exactly, Camille will be lost, but that's not the only reason we read every word with fascination. It's a perfect portrait of an ordinary but complicated Minnesota family, as are many of Kilgore's stories.

But other stories suffer from an aggravating flaw -- an assumption that we will fill in pregnant gaps with events not described and meanings merely hinted at. For this and other reasons, the story "Market Fair" is almost incomprehensible. It's impossible to tell which character is speaking or thinking, and what links one scene to the next. Like many young writers, Kilgore goes out of his way not to give everything away, sometimes veering too far the other way, leaving the reader wondering what in the heck that was all about.

It's as if Kilgore threw everything he's written so far into this collection, instead of doing the tough work of winnowing, of keeping the gems and tossing out the duds. A good editor might have helped him with that tough business.

That being said, this volume is worth snapping up for its successful stories, and for the brilliance it hints at. Kilgore is a Minnesotan to the core, and he conveys what it means to be one beautifully in his best stories. We have high expectations for his next effort.

Pamela Miller is a Star Tribune night metro editor.