The story, moreover, begins in a realistic register in which “hot water cascaded from shiny metal taps. . . [and] steam rose, swirled, made the air around him hot and moist” (9). It is true that his grooming paraphernalia includes a razor with which he intends to slit his wrists, but the arc of the story appears to rise from this low point. After all, we first meet Odysseus sobbing on the beach when he believes that he is trapped on Calypso’s island. After all, Welling’s lover Corelle does return, and he may be ready to deal with his attraction to under-age girls. Yet all is not what it seems or what the reader expects in this world, which makes “Suicide Note” an especially effective beginning to Music for the Off-Key.

Other stories are no less surprising, although they take place in settings where one expects violent turns of events. I could imagine an Americanized version of “Sound of the Drums” or “The Great White Hate” on one of the rapper Guru’s Jazzamatazz albums with their bluntly-cut slices of life in Brooklyn. The second story in the collection, “Double Room,” is set in a mysterious luxury hotel where the desk clerk, Serena, pursues a young man who appears to be a female CEO’s plaything. “Gold,” the third story, concerns the baffling dynamic between Laramie, a homeless Black man, and Blaine, a jewellery store clerk. She befriends him, even to the point of bringing him to her apartment, but then throws him out when she learns that he has stolen some rings, a crime for which she had lost her job. Laramie then returns to the streets where he and his dog, Styler, become the victims of random violence. Also intriguing is “The Child Who Wished,” a story about Ebi, an African child who, knowing little or no English, becomes the victim of bullies but then avenges himself. Even when Newland’s stories end in redemption or release, as in “Flight of Freedom” or “Healing Hands,” their endings shock and startle.

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