Black Coffee Night by Emily Schultz, Insomniac Press, 157 pages, $19.95

Lust in the late '90s equals similar motions divided by differing emotions. It is desire searching for a new language to detail its nervous, sweaty wrinkles and folds: "We're sex obsessed as a culture and ... ultimately it damages our enjoyment of the sexual act, because we are always considering its value. Like standing in a supermarket trying to decide between two brands of salsa and whether $1.99 will taste as good as $3.69, regretting the decision no matter which we choose."

To discover sexual metaphor on the supermarket shelves proves that Toronto's Emily Schultz has accepted the descriptive challenge of 20-something lust. She tries, with success, to mousetrap the curls of lust onto the page. In "The Amateurs" Jon, a cafe patron, notices a "pretty girl with a lazy eye" enter the coffee shop. "Her black pants bit and nipped in all her narrow parts."

But lust is complicated. There is the moment and its aftermath; passion versus logic. Jon, the fellow in the cafe, mixes the physical with the analytical by noting, "I think you know right away with someone. Their skin calls to you. That first night. If it doesn't go well, walk away. If it does go well, run like hell. With us, it went both ways."

Anticipation is everywhere in these short stories, both sexual and professional - characters wait for reassurance in the arms of another or wonder when they might finally begin to enjoy a stable, adult identity. Ambiguity is equally important, as sexualities slither and shift across continuums. Pronouns obscure genders, hesitant actions suggest confused motives.

Schultz inhabits tiny places and spaces, adding gentle puffs of air to inflate their significance. The first story, "Foam," establishes her ability with detail, in a compressed burst of sadness and wonder. The man behind the coffee counter "Gives them all the same thing, the only difference being more or less." The barista's girlfriend, meanwhile, has "hair like an old photograph" and her teeth "worry the rim of the Styrofoam." Their relationship is troubled, but then, no one in Black Coffee Night is able to generate or debug the code that keeps two people together.

Schultz's strengths - fresh lust, strong female characterization, a willingness to experiment - combine and explode in "The Value Of X," a compelling anti-romance that was recently adapted for television. "J." (short for Jeanette) is a high school girl who likes boys who dress like girls and lucky for her, a fellow named "Z." (short for Zachary) is willing to oblige, temporarily. As J. observes, "Z.'s punchlines were always more clever, more abstract, harder sometimes with a truth that took time before it could be seen through its subtlety."

Measured against "The Value Of X," the lessor fiction in Black Coffee Night is lacking in those qualities the successful stories have in abundance: life and lust. Schultz relies heavily on the fuel of experience for power and the absence is quickly noticed. She does best in stories involving death or something with equal gravitas: "Later just the bed, the breathing breathing breathing slowly stitching itself out, until that loose end on the spool finally flips free, leaving the wooden bobbin body." Schultz usually fails when she tries to build momentum through style alone.

"Substitute," about twin girls on the same soccer team, never becomes more than a story about a game, and two full-page illustrations detailing the action act only as an unnecessary Dave Eggers-style indulgence. Finally, the lengthy (and terrible) Anais Nin epigraph does Schultz few favours.

Schultz does not deserve furious rebukes for her risks and tangents. This is fiction that seduces. It is filled with curiosities. Not every encounter captures the imagination but no book lover can ever be wholly satisfied.