There are moments in Jennifer Down’s stories that burn into your memory like bright lights on your retinas. A brother and sister stand at opposite ends of a field, whispering to each other through satellite dishes. A young man caught in a flash of headlights clutches a trembling jerry can full of petrol. A mossy skull and a shoe disintegrate into the soil of Aokigahara, a forest at the foot of Mount Fuji where hundreds of people go each year to commit suicide.

Most of the stories in Pulse Points – either directly or obliquely – involve someone sick, dying or dead. As with Down’s debut, Our Magic Hour, grief and heartache manifest in tiny movements and subtle turns of dialogue, in brief and strange flashes of poignancy that spark up through the lilting awkwardness of life.

Three shorter stories midway through this collection stand out as particularly gut-wrenching. ‘Dogs’ follows a gang of sex-hungry boys led by the burly Foggo. ‘Convalescence’ is about a shell-shocked couple in Paris after they terminate their unborn child. In ‘Vaseline’, bored high-school girls in New Mexico learn self-defence when a man starts attacking people on the street.

The longer, more nuanced and self-contained stories are ‘Pulse Points’, which opens the collection, the closing story ‘Coarsegold’, and ‘Aokigahara’, a story about a woman who travels to Japan to farewell her dead brother; it won the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2014. They are brilliant and affecting stories, at times stark and deftly detailed, told with characters who are hard to shake; I still think of Audrey, the protagonist of Our Magic Hour, more than a year after I read it.

Jennifer Down is a subtly extraordinary writer, and Pulse Points is one of the best Australian literary offerings we’ll see this year.

Reviewed by Angus Dalton