It is no simple matter to save someone or to be saved

In Oymyakon, Russia, the coldest inhabited place on Earth, the mayor is a 22-year-old woman named Vera, and all the single (and some of the married) men in town have proposed to her. She’s always said no. At least, this is the version of Oymyakon that Erika Krouse, author of “Tell Me Everything” — a memoir about her work as a private investigator and her own history of sexual violence — presents in her newest short story collection, “Save Me, Stranger.”

In Krouse’s “Pole of Cold,” an American comes, a rare tourist; most visitors are foreign scientists. Vera’s aunt, Lyuda, is pleased to see that he’s not only young, but handsome too. As Vera is beautiful, and the American finds her impressive and intelligent besides, he naturally wants to take her away from this place where he can’t maintain his veganism, where the cold is so intense that his Gore-Tex gear breaks apart. “You must want more than this,” he tells her. “In America, you can — see great art. Think about something besides survival. Go to college.” Vera is tempted, but also put off: Of course she’s thought about leaving, but she never wanted her way out to be a wedding ring. Plus, as she reminds the American when he worries about being cut off from the world in Oymyakon, “This is the world, too.”

It’s rare, in my experience, that the titles of short story collections reflect an identifiable unifying theme, but “Save Me, Stranger” is full of people saving one another. But this isn’t some twee book full of uncomplicated heroics; Krouse’s characters demonstrate that it is no simple matter to be saved or to save another, and the attempts lead to surprising sources of conflict and a powerful, at times uncomfortable, moral ambiguity.

In the title story, for example, the narrator and her daughter, Mina, are at a convenience store getting hot chocolate when the place is robbed at gunpoint. The robbers are all set to take the narrator with them when a teenage boy steps in and takes her place; before he leaves the store, he says only one word to the narrator: “Olivia.” Moments later, as they drive away, the robbers shoot and kill the boy. Why? The police suggest “gang initiation shootings,” and say that the boy leaving with the robbers voluntarily means there might be some gang connection between them. “Voluntarily?” the narrator wonders, shaking as she reads this account in the paper. “Is that what they called leaving at gunpoint?” Over the coming days, the narrator struggles to understand the teenager who saved her life and tries to find Olivia, all while clearly plagued with unnamed survivor’s guilt.

In “Eat My Moose,” a pair of terminally ill combat veterans, Bonnie and Colum, get a stay of execution of sorts by becoming professional euthanizers. For reasons they don’t understand, after they helped one of their friends from a VA support group die — per his request — their respective cancers seem to go into remission. Their tumors are still present in tests, yet they feel miraculously healthy. “Who knows what a euthanizer is supposed to look like,” Colum narrates at the story’s opening, “but judging from my clients’ expressions when they answer their door, they don’t expect a sweat-sopped middle-aged guy in overalls. … They’re always relieved to see me, even me. It doesn’t matter what death looks like, acts like, smells like. It only matters that I’m there.” Bonnie and Colum both live with the weight of the death and destruction they sowed while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan; in comparison, the act of euthanasia feels merciful. “How you die should be up to you,” Colum believes. After all, how “you live is usually up to everyone else.”

Indeed, many of the narrators (and all the stories in “Save Me, Stranger” are written in first person) are trying to escape a life lived by someone else’s rules. In “North of Dodge,” for instance, a white high school graduate moves to a majority Black neighborhood in Omaha, believing it to be the best place to hide from her white supremacist uncle. And in “Fear Me as You Fear God,” a young woman runs away from her newly abusive husband and begins to work at a haunted bed and breakfast in exchange for room and board.

Perhaps the most harrowing story, “When in Bangkok,” is narrated by a tween whose father has moved the family to Singapore for his job, and who has taken them on vacation to Bangkok four years in a row, where they stay in the Patong district, known for its sex tourism. The narrator never tells us what her father has done to her and her sister, both now too old for his tastes, but every scene demonstrates, often quietly, the weight of his violence, sexual and otherwise, past and present.

Krouse’s narrators are far from perfect; they’re messy, problematic and human, and all the more interesting for their contradictions. “Save Me, Stranger” is the kind of collection whose stories stick around even after they’re done, inviting you to sit with the questions they raise, the discomfort they provoke and the beauty on which they shine a light.

Ilana Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming “Beings.”