Haunting amorphous creatures, five a.m. booty calls, and deceased loved ones visiting in dreams—so it goes in Mattaboni’s wicked, eclectic collection of short stories, which both lives up to its title and takes “Gore,” “Lust,” and “Kin” as organizing principles. The first section, “Gore,” focuses on body horror, with sharp, surprising premises that it’s best to know nothing about. Let Mattaboni’s squirmily witty descriptions entice: “I could see my suited half-self below, slumped and impossible against the cement, pants full of melting black cherry jam that painted the sidewalk” and “she was a smoldering pile of melted muscle, slinking up the stairs.”

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A second section, “Lust,” features stories that focus on the intimacies of relationships, new and old, and sexuality. The messy anxieties of the characters—Jackie, who moved to Queens after college, vows to find her way to being a normal person again and catches herself saying to a lover, “I bled for you for weeks”—are matched by the brisk confidence of the storytelling. “Kin,” the tenderest section, explores familial ties and childhood. Within these themes, Mattaboni plumbs the minds and bodies—corporeal and otherwise—of characters who struggle with all it means to be human. In “Change for Domenik,” protagonist Gina’s mother is said to have “this near-psychic ability to pinpoint a person’s character down to the bone within two minutes of meeting them”; in eerie detail, she foretells what her daughter could expect from a guy named Domenick.

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The stories are singular but also overlap in striking imagery and hard truths. Rena in “Dragonflies” says “acting, I was good at. Living, not so much” after the death of her partner leaves her in the limbo of loving a memory, while Genevieve in “The Last Ember” faces the pain of living with the ghost of her mother due to a brain disorder; the moments of clarity might “only last a few moments before she falls back into obscurity.” Mattaboni shocks, dazzles, moves, and illuminates shadowy depths.