Plunging into one of Kentuckian Alex Taylor's whiskey-soaked, sweat-stained, blood-crusty short stories is like being lost in a fetid, dangerous, fascinating swamp. You end each story feeling heavy and exhausted, maybe a little drunk, shaking your head to get free of the intense images and humid atmosphere.

It's best to take a little break between Alex Taylor stories.

All are set in backwoods or backwash towns, presumably in Kentucky, on what always feels like the hottest day or darkest night of the century (the centuries vary). Characters are almost universally in need of a bath, a muffler, an education, a less rusty trailer, a clue. They're headstrong, outrageous, cruel, occasionally murderous, always poor of pocket and more often than not poor in spirit.

Most of us have never met anyone like the people in Alex Taylor's stories, and, honestly, most of us would prefer not to. Yet meeting them here, in the pages of Taylor's first book of short stories, "The Name of the Nearest River," is a weird treat. Here's a little taste -- the opening paragraph of "The Evening Part of Daylight":

It was Lustus Sheetmire's wedding day and he'd just punched his new bride Loressa in the jaw. The reception guests flocked around her. Most of them were near drunk and wept with disbelief. Loressa staggered back, crumpling onto the mown bank of the lake where the reception was being held, an eruption of suds beside the still murk of the water in her dress and veil. Some of the guests had been fishing at the moment of violence, their hooks baited with shrimp and catalpa worms settling on the bottom, their poles and Baitcaster reels rising lewdly from between their legs. And now this.

Taylor, who is still in his 20s, writes with wit, zest and skill. His best characters are children and teenagers who still have the freshness to be astounded by or resistant to their brutal, beet-necked elders, even as they hurl headlong toward being pretty much just like them.

Taylor's dark tales are too fantastical, his weird characters too gleefully drawn, to qualify him as a traditional regional writer. Rather, his work is a trip down the rabbit hole to a weird mindset and culture that isn't exclusively American; you might find people a little like his in any very isolated geography on any continent, in any time period.

These just happen to be set in Kentucky. And Kentucky is lucky to have a writer as weird, unique and gifted as Alex Taylor. In the long queue of very good contemporary Southern writers, here's a guy who can cut to the front, and not just because he, like his characters, is so frankly scary-looking.

Pamela Miller is a Star Tribune night metro editor.