Imagine fiction as a village where one can vacation for the cost of a book. In that village, Craig Boyko’s Blackouts stands out on the street. A disparate cast of welcoming characters and a glorious collection of historical, psychological, scientific and metaphysical curiosities occupy it.

Born in Saskatchewan, a graduate from the University of Calgary and now a resident of Victoria, B.C., Boyko imbues many of the 11 short stories contained in Blackouts with a local flavour. In the same way Boyko’s narrator in the story “Nadesha Pavlona” wonders about a Tchaikovsky song — “how its existence had never been celebrated” — the collection makes you wonder why literature isn’t given more veneration. Blackouts illuminates the seemingly obvious and wakes us up to the world unfolding around us.

Like a skilled composer, Boyko samples from many eras and many lives while simultaneously maintaining a sense of continuity. Mixing observations on memory, love, mathematics and language, he makes mysterious layers of the human experience wondrously accessible.

He also has a refined appreciation for language. In the story “Holes,” the narrator “read[s] the classifieds like haikus,” while in “The Mean,” a schoolgirl contemplates the bizarre intricacies of the English language and the exciting possibility of a phrase like: “the sky was grey and the kitten was gray.”

In Boyko’s Journey Prize-winning story “Ozy,” young Ossie reflects on the concept of forever and his fleeting high score on the game Ballistic Obliteration. “I took one day… and tried to hold it in my head all at once,” he says. “Then I shrunk it down to a dot, a mere speck, and populated the vacated space with a hundred dots, a thousand specks. A sandstorm of days — as many as I’d ever see in all my life. I compressed the dust cloud too, squeezed it down into a tiny cube and pushed it to the edge of my imagination.”

That tiny cube is much like Blackouts. Every story in this thoughtful collection deserves to be digested slowly and separately. Narratives set in Stalinist Russia lie comfortably overleaf of those set in present-day, small-town B.C. Drawing either from his own adventures in literature and life, or from a wildly perceptive imagination, Boyko writes in one story about a recovering alcoholic. In another, he explores the intimate relationship between a nymph-like fledgling actress confusingly in love with a computer programmer.

Conclusions to the stories tend to be un-obvious. Instead, each is a snapshot of time and character. As a whole, the collection is a series of curious moments made briefly visible through words.