The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites is a collection of eleven short stories by Peter Stenson that dissect the suburban milieu of Stapleton, Colorado, an upper middle-class white community of work-from-home professionals who have 2.5 children, live in tract homes, drive midsized SUVs and Subaru wagons, and get their coffee at Starbucks while fantasizing about fucking their neighbors.

The title page of this work of fiction contains a subtext: “a novel in stories.” Although some characters appear in multiple stories and all the stories seem to be set in Stapleton, there is no narrative thread that ties the stories together. Rather, each is a vignette of some seedy, hidden aspect of suburban life.

The first story in the collection shares its title with that of the book and is a discomforting account of a neighborhood swinger’s party gone wrong. It suggests that the seemingly insignificant disconnects in marital relationships are, in fact, unnavigable abysses. Our struggles to communicate, our differences in values, the increasing sense of boredom with each other—all of them tiny itches on the surface of marriage, revealing chasms below when scratched.

Many of the stories employ magical realism. There’s the day-trading baby who can’t yet walk but knows how to take a cash advance from his father’s credit card to bet on some overseas pharmaceutical penny stock. There’s Slim Me!, the weight-loss wonder drug that in one night will allow a woman to shrink several dress sizes, albeit with one side-effect: growing feet. And there are middle-aged cucks who grow antlers, wear them like heavy crowns, and find solace in Cuckold Anonymous, a twelve-step program for those with cheating wives.

I’m not one to read fantasy, and this book represents my first engaged reading of magical realism, aside from Stenson’s short story that appeared in The Sun, entitled Bone Frag. Despite my initial reservations, the magical elements do not hinder the depth of feeling these stories convey.

It seems that Stenson has lived the experiences of which he writes, most of them anyway, or lived close to them, for how else could he bring such life to them? I don’t see a way to gain intimate understanding of a heroin junkie’s lifestyle, for example, or middle-class culture, unless you’ve waded through them. Though Stenson’s online profile is sparse, it suggests he lives in Colorado (or did), is married with two kids, and used “copious amounts of drugs” in his younger years. In other words, don’t let the magic dispel you from the realism, as it almost did me.

If you live in the suburbs, as 52% of Americans do, you’re likely to find The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites to be an unsettling and provocative peeling-back of your life and values. Stenson explores themes of monogamy, status, parenthood, work, community, desire, regret, vanity, jealousy, and anal bleaching, leaving a wake of malaise on middle-class living. Life with a white picket fence and a private education for kids and a pink winky to peer at while doing it doggy-style and a neighborhood watch and a faith in God and a happy-wife-happy-life attitude is NOT a pathway exempt from having to push a boulder uphill, over and over again.

The gods don’t play favorites. The dream is the nightmare. The nightmare is reality. And reality is what, exactly?

In Peter Stenson’s The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites, it’s a place where the wives want more than their husbands can provide, the husbands are men they swore they’d never become, the children are growing overweight and struggle at school, for which the parents are ashamed, and the technologies that promise to make you beautiful or the chemicals that promise to ease your pain have hidden and heinous consequences.

It’s a banal existence, and nobody can really explain how they ended up there. What’s more, nobody can find a way out, though all are desperately looking.

Reading The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites felt a bit like a bad acid trip. Unpleasant, but worth it. And like a bad trip, the book is relatively bleak the whole way through. Sardonic. I kept waiting for the silver lining, a shiny ribbon that would bind the despair, make sense of it all through some familiar lens of American idealism. But it never came.

Highly recommended.