Two of the book's nine stories center on men. In the other stories in this fine, edgy, often bleak collection, young women crash parties on Indian reservations, break into homes, or live in the woods or in broken-down trailers at the end of desolate Montana roads. Sexually and physically abused as children, the characters experience more in their frequent journeys from home than most adults experience in a lifetime.

In "Heavenly Creatures," a county prosecutor estimates that "more than three hundred homeless children roamed the woods surrounding Kalispell." They are like "dark birds rising on ... dark wings." Safely at home with her children, the story's narrator, a young mother, sympathizes with the woods-children. "Your children [Kalispell's] are my children," she thinks. "They are dangerous. They are in danger." She's known this since grade school when the frightening Evan Kinkaid broke into her mother's house and in doing so "burst in my heart" with his anger.

Characters such as Dora Stone in "Necessary Angels" or the girl hitchhiker in "Nobody's Daughters" attempt to forget what has happened to them in childhood. They can't escape memories by running away. Forget and they risk losing compassion for the similarly troubled. This is author Melanie Rae Thon's characters' dilemma: They try destroying themselves in order to forget the past, yet they also know that goodness, compassion, "that instant of trapped light," God perhaps, exists in the world.

In "Iona Moon," Iona learns how her rearing on Kila Flats outside White Falls, Idaho, marks her as poor trash. Desperate for happiness, she tries seducing her boyfriend's unwilling pal. In "Nobody's Daughters," a schizophrenic and a suicidal transsexual cruise Boston's adult entertainment district. One night they break into a house in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. In a revery, Nadine tells the absent woman homeowner, whose bed she and Emile have slept in and whose clothes they've tried on, "I wanted to love you."

"Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer" begins "I was a natural liar, like my mother." Drunk one night, Ada, the narrator, kills an Indian man walking along the highway, lies about it and is haunted for life.

The other sad, beautiful stories concern dislocation, loss, the desire for a safe home, for redemption. Raymond Good Bear in the book's penultimate story comes back to his family after 22 years. Greeted by them, he dies the same day -- dies, one might say, wrapped in the arms of the Mother of God. A similar welcome occurs in the final story, "Tu B'shvat."

The book's epigraph reads "within the pain of living and the tragedy of dying there is ... a luminous mystery that redeems the human adventure in the world." Luminous mysteries comfort the suffering in Thon's luminous book.

Anthony Bukoski, author of five short-story collections, lives in Superior, Wis.