Three stories, all set in the small town called Sam Dent in Essex County, northern New York State.

A man regrets the sale of a large plot of land to a man who has become increasingly irritating and unfriendly. The plot (over 300 acres) had been in his family’s hands for generations, and he’s always hunted there. He’d planned to teach his teenage son to hunt deer there, too, but now that’s under threat.

A family move into their new home to discover that their next-door neighbours are two white women and four black children. At first, contact is minimal, but then friendly overtures are forthcoming. But odd events start to cause concerns, and soon, events take a dramatic turn.

Two elderly grandparents are kidnapped from their home by two men. They claim that their grandson has something that they want returned to them. Some bad blood between the grandparents and their grandson’s mother are also in the mix. This could all end badly.

It took me a while to get into each of these stories, but slowly, each grew on me. My favourite is the first story, I just found that I could somehow most identify with the man at the centre of the tale. The writing is strong and highly impactful. There is violence here, these scenes being unvarnished and, to me, quite shocking.

I’ll look out more from this writer – this being my first experience of his work – but I’d urge all readers of this book to approach it with a little caution: there’s certainly a bite in each tale.

This was a book I wanted to like and couldn’t. I imagine the aim of the book was a noble one: inhabit the lives of people other authors wouldn’t give the time of day, and remind us that even these bigoted, Trump-voting sociopaths are rounded human beings as well.

This was a task the late Russell Banks should have been more than equal to. A working-class American writer whose fiction was no stranger to the rust belt or the trailer park, his best work (especially The Sweet Hereafter, memorably filmed by Atom Egoyan) avoids caricatures and snap moral judgements. Furthermore, they felt their way into the characters feelings.

These three long short stories, which are not as closely linked as you might think, do the opposite. They feel willed, not intuited, and the abrupt tonal shifts stall the narrative.