John McManus’s writing is often like a scream in the distance; his style is intense but oblique, and he tends to slip large details right in alongside the small. If you’re not entirely engaged, you can easily get discouraged and lost, or simply not hear the anguish as the characters’ lives sputter sadly along. Three years ago, McManus debuted with the short-story collection Stop Breakin Down (Picador). The book was remarkable in its range: whether he told of twentysomething trendoids or 10-year-olds weighed down by heat and poverty in Appalachia, he seemed to know everything about his characters and their environments, and his style was assertive and sometimes breathtakingly inventive. Stop Breakin Down won him the Whiting Writers Award. At 22, he was the youngest person to take home the prestigious $35,000 prize.

Born on a Train (Picador), his new collection of short stories, has much in common with Stop Breakin Down: varied locales; characters of all ages, classes, sexes, and sexual persuasions. And McManus continues to dump us in the middle of a story and leave us to figure out the who, where, and why. It’s a challenge that can tire, and Born on a Train gives off occasional yelps of pretension as the author stretches words and imagery to the point of self-indulgence. But his inclination to experiment and push is also what allows his stories to burn on in your memory. He can turn the simplest words into something resonant, as when a smitten guy muses, " I knew his face from sixty different angles. "

Some of the most potent stories convey experiences of children whose lives are a nightmare of destitution and loneliness made all the worse by their acute self-awareness. In " Brood, " a 30-year-old mother drags her 15-year-old daughter around the country in hopes of starting a life with men she meets on the Internet. We find them in Virginia, at the dreary lair of a blockhead father and his three crude sons. The daughter has lost all hope and has only her deadpan outlook to sustain herself. Like many of McManus’s characters, she’s concerned with the limitations of language and human relationships. " It takes so long to think of how to say a sentence. By the end it’s hard to locate the beginning, " she’s thinking. One of the sons asks whether she doesn’t get lonely living everywhere. " Only when I’m around people, " she answers.

She probably could identify with seven-year-old Isaac in " Dog’s Egg. " He lives in a trailer in the Kentucky mountains with his pill-popping, whiskey-swilling father, Jearold, who starves their pet German shepherd to death in hopes of making it " mean. " Jearold treats his poor kid pretty much the same way, dragging him on a Christmas-night trip across the Appalachians to play a gruesome practical joke on his employer. On the journey, Isaac prefers to sit next to the bones of his dog than " be so close to people he didn’t like. " Like the girl in " Brood " (and most other kids in Stop Breakin Down), he’s got a better brain than his parent.

Earlier in " Dog’s Egg, " snow begins to fall and Isaac slides into an uneasy slumber. He begins to imagine flies dying from the cold. " They died on Diesel’s body, on the metal kitchen table which was gray and shiny from its plating bath, and on every part of the dark, bare countertop; on an empty beer can and on the unmade single bed where Jearold now lay drunk and softly snoring. . . .  " It’s a black-comic perversion of the transcendent finale of James Joyce’s " The Dead, " in which snow falls " through the universe " and connects all of humanity, living and dead. Although McManus’s universe is pierced with startling lyricism (discounting the fly carcasses and other earthly delights), his version of humankind endures in cold isolation.

Because he creates such disparate characters and circumstances, unifying threads emerge slowly if at all. If anything binds Born on a Train, it’s the way the characters get knocked down by internal and external forces. McManus named Stop Breakin Down after an old blues song, and it’s conceivable that he named Born on a Train after a Magnetic Fields song. The Magnetic Fields tend toward melancholy and misanthropy, and their " Born on a Train " concludes with a hopelessness similar to that felt by many McManus characters: " Some people don’t believe in dying, but some of us don’t believe in life. "