It's easy to get disoriented while reading The Torturer's Apprentice, John Biguenet's debut anthology. Few of the deceptively simple stories have any discernible physical or temporal setting; at most, an isolated reference to the French Quarter or to AIDS will provide one of the widely spread metaphorical slalom poles through which Biguenet maneuvers. Even when there are clues, they're often at odds with the author's modern writing style; the appearance of a slave, a ship's chandler, or a "plague" of frogs raining from the sky sets up expectations that the author casually fails to either support or refute. Instead, he usually disperses all specifics into a vague, Platonic-ideal haze: His characters attend "the university," or work at unspecified jobs in "one of our larger cities." In the most extreme case, the brief vignette "A Battlefield In Moonlight," the protagonist is nameless and his country unidentified, the battle and location of the battlefield deliberately left vague. Such trivia would interfere with the slender intimacy of these powerful stories, which consciously erase the larger world to bring a narrower one into focus. Pity and epiphany form the cruxes of most of Apprentice's tales: Some come down on the side of pity while others argue against it, but all involve small but crucial internal realizations that make or break a relationship, a life, or a mind. Sometimes the relationships are unconventional, as in "Do Me," which deals with a masochist and the sensitive boyfriend who doesn't want to hurt her, either physically or by refusing her the physical hurt she demands. Sometimes only the characters are unconventional, as with "Gregory's Fate," in which a besotted boy with the inexplicable (and awkward) power to change into any animal pursues a derisive lover. But in every case, Biguenet avoids familiar, pat concepts as deftly as he avoids familiar settings and styles. Ultimately, his talent for obliterating the known world in each story allows him to rebuild from scratch, and each unpredictable new planet he builds on his consciously fuzzy foundations is more fascinating than the last.