Wherever your literary comfort zone is, the chances are that Christine Schutt is outside it. The American novelist’s prose, she says, “calls for close, hard readers of fiction”. That is one way of saying that the stories in this collection evade easy capture – but in reading, isn’t the pursuit part of the pleasure?

Schutt’s prose doesn’t lack traditional qualities. It’s full of dramatic events: violent death features in around half the stories. It has a way with vivid imagery, such as the mother who has to give her daughter “pills that turned the girl into a parade balloon in need of handlers”. And it has emotional weight: no parent will read “The Hedges” without checking anxiously on their youngest child afterwards.

Yet Schutt’s style – in which words crash together musically, the focus shifts and dialogue seems to take even the characters by surprise – means that the qualities come out best on a slow rereading. The reader may never get to the end of some of the stories here. Depending on your viewpoint, that may make Pure Hollywood an exercise in frustration, or one of the best value books ever published.

• Pure Hollywood is published by And Other Stories. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.