Akashic Books, 280 pages, trade paperback, $14.00

It isn’t spoiling anything to say that the 20 stories in Joe Meno’s 2008 collection Demons in the Spring — originally issued in a limited hardcover run of 4,000 copies from Akashic Books in 2008 and set for re-release in paperback on August 1, 2010 — won’t leave the reader all giddy with happiness.

That’s not because the writing is poor — far from it — and it’s not because the stories, for the most part, aren’t engaging to the point of being utterly absorbing — they are.

It’s because Meno’s characters, executed in fine form from children to adults of both sexes, often wind up just as lost at the “end” of their stories as they are when we meet them at the beginning, leaving them (and the reader) with, at best, the “quiet happiness” Meno so often refers to throughout the collection. And, as it seems Meno well understands, it is precisely these moments of quiet happiness in life that are ultimately most satisfying.

The stories themselves range in substance from the straight literary to unabashedly surreal. Among the former category are “Ghost Plane,” in which a man meets a young woman 10 years his junior at a party and takes her to Belize, where she proceeds to have a nervous breakdown; “I Want the Quiet Moments of a Party Girl,” which examines the relationship of a young couple over the tragic course of an unexpected pregnancy; and “Get Well, Seymour!” in which a studious Princeton freshmen is torn between honoring a promise to his adolescent sister and carrying on a relationship with the beautiful girl who spited her on a cruise ship.

Among the latter are “People Are Becoming Clouds,” in which a man reevaluates his life after his wife begins transforming into an actual cloud at the first hint of excitement; “The Architecture of the Moon,” in which the moon and stars have disappeared and slowly take over the nighttime hours that case the Earth in darkness; and “Airports of Light,” in which a woman discovers a miniature city developing fatally within the cavity of her chest.

Yet Meno — a bestselling author of five novels and two story collections (including “Demons”) who teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago — is at his best when the stories fall somewhere in between the two.

In “It Is Romance,” the faculty advisor to a high school Model United Nations is forced to confront his loneliness as he successively realizes how much the group of children mean to him in ways he can’t quite grasp. Despite the increasingly inappropriate actions of the instructor, Mr. Albee, throughout the story — even as the man, for instance, begins driving his students to a dangerous part of the city in the hopes that they will all be killed together — Meno turns him into a character both pathetic and sympathetic all at once: “He imagines death will be like the end of a wonderful evening at the opera, when the baroque bronze doors are slowly opened by the bedecked ushers and the gentry — noisy, tired, overexcited — come hurtling out,” Meno writes. “The audience, having seen what there was to see, finally crossing into the dark night to simply return home, no blood, no pain, only a kind of sadness, a kind of disappointment at the songs that weren’t sung, at the actors’ kisses that weren’t actually kissed, at the scenes that were unknowingly cut.”

In the standout “What a Schoolgirl You Are,” a high school outcast decides to try out for the cheerleading team after the captain of the squad commits suicide. One of the most engrossing pieces in the collection, the story also happens to be one of the best examples of effective second-person writing in recent memory, and Meno’s voice disappears completely into his character — no small feat considering the character in question is a high school sophomore girl.

“You are fifteen and waiting with much dread for your first period to come,” Meno writes at the beginning of the story. “Your body is a green twig, full of knots and unattractive bumps and angles. You have decorated your folders with the same drawings of the same Pegasus leaping over the same castle. What a schoolgirl you are.”

Throughout the collection, Meno displays an uncanny knack for narrative. Yet the sword of his dialogue, when he chooses to wield it, slices clean into the sequence with a vengeance rarely rivaled. And, as with the protagonist of “Schoolgirl,” one never questions the authenticity of the voice.

In “Oceanland,” for instance, a man returns to his family’s marine park to find it falling into disrepair under the poor management of his younger brother. Barry, the returning brother, is sympathetic toward the marine animals whose tanks are in such sad shape, as with the moray eels, with whom he waxes apologetic, gently whispering: “I know you would like to bite my hand right now. I know you would like to hurt me. If we were in the ocean, you would be faster than me. You would definitely kill me. I am sorry you cannot injure me right now.”

Jack, Barry’s stoner brother, has better things to worry about than fish, as evidenced by the “there are a couple of things I think you should know about me” talk he gives Barry in response to being confronted by Barry with his concerns: “One: in the last couple of years,” Jack says, “I have become one of the greatest living guitar players of all time.”

The book is as beautifully constructed physically as it is creatively, printed oversized on thick, high-quality paper and featuring illustrations for each story by artists from the fine, graphic and comic-book art worlds.

At its best, the collection will leave the reader with a sense of true beauty, as beauty is always best when dusted with the shadow of heartache. At its worst, it will leave the reader with feelings similar to the protagonist’s young sister in “Get Well, Seymour!” whose glasses shine with “the perpetual viciousness of hope” that things turn out okay.