Review: 'Fortune Smiles,' by Adam Johnson

"The Cub activates." "Toucan cereal bedspread." "Eyeball."

The stories in Adam Johnson's excellent second collection, "Fortune Smiles," tend to open by introducing a cryptic word or phrase whose meaning isn't fully revealed at first. That's a handy way for any short-story writer to hook a reader. But Johnson hides especially dark and peculiar meanings: Those innocent unexplained words soon lead to visions of emotional and physical wreckage, from North Korea to post-Katrina Louisiana to East German torture facilities. Gotcha, you imagine Johnson saying, each time.

Consider that Cub, who appears early in "Dark Meadow." It's a young girl who's being observed by the narrator, a neighbor who's trying to suppress his pedophiliac instincts. (You can guess what "activates" means.) As the narrator shifts from helping to bust child-porn rings to fighting off his urges to recalling his own past abuse, Johnson exposes his anguish without coddling him. When the narrator says "once something bad happens, it happens every minute of your life, it can't be undone," he's speaking for himself and those in danger around him.

Johnson has a particular affinity for characters like that, those typically dismissed as grotesque or unknowable. The hero of "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine" is a former Stasi prison warden determined to defend his former workplace, now a museum. Stolen possessions are a "lost and found" to him; "punishment," he insists to visitors, was an "interview regimen"; "torture" is merely a "metaphor." His refusal to acknowledge reality is indisputably ugly, but as Johnson piles on details of the warden's obliviousness to the suffering of those nearest him, he becomes a fuller figure of pity and empathy.

A similar complication drives in the title story, about a pair of North Korean defectors attempting to settle into new lives in Seoul. In his 2012 novel, "The Orphan Master's Son," Johnson gave the cloistered North Korean mind-set human shape and nuance, and he does the same here for those thrust out of the regime. "I appreciate democracy, freedom and the variety of television programming," one says. "But I do miss how dark it used to get."

Newness, Johnson means to say, won't fix us — a change of scenery itself won't heal old wounds. Nor will technology. In "Nirvana," the narrator has created a talking hologram of a recently assassinated president. Downloaded by 14 million people, he's a source of digital reassurance, but the inventor's personal life remains stubbornly human and difficult. "Seek your inner resolve," the faux president commands. But how much weight can you give advice from a hollow vessel? Very little, Johnson knows. But he also recognizes our need to do the weighing.

Mark Athitakis is a reviewer in Phoenix.