In the title story of Irish author Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields, a countryside priest unhappily presides over his former girlfriend’s marriage. It is gradually revealed that this wayward man of the cloth blew his only chance for love when he refused to leave the clergy for her, and his performance of the ceremony, though superficially generous, is an act of intense self-flagellation. In another story, a woman tells her husband that he’s not the father of the girl they raised; then the man’s half-wit son (this one is really his) burns the family farm to the ground. This is par for the course in Keegan’s ultrableak world. The rural settings are pleasantly described, but there is rarely relief on the horizon—only betrayal and inescapable despair.

The stories are complex enough to emit other emotions, too, as Keegan lends her fiction a moment of absurd humor or a glimpse of mirth. In the collection’s most lighthearted story, “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer takes up temporary residence at the home of German author Heinrich Böll, but is almost immediately set upon by a comically pushy professor intent on ruining her stay. She is also capable of imbuing her tales with a spookiness that never quite becomes supernatural: “Night of the Quicken Trees,” an eerie romance between lonely seaside neighbors, puts a modern spin on an old Irish myth. Still, the prevailing feeling here is mournfulness, both for the lost-soul characters and their fading rural epoch. Keegan describes it all with an intelligent and engaging voice, but her appetite for dreariness often subdues her storytelling gifts.