If anyone wanted to test the idiom, “Wherever you go, there you are,” Myriam Lacroix has formulated an effective literary experiment to do so: force the same two characters into a handful of outlandish circumstances in disparate settings. How It Works Out (Doubleday Canada) is Lacroix’s debut collection of linked stories. She explores the bond between the central character (also named Myriam) and her partner Allison, suggesting eight possible endings for their doomed relationship. The opening story, “The Meaning of Life,” prepares the reader for the wacky, altered realities that lie ahead. In “Mantis,” Myriam the Praying Mantis and Allison the loyal mutt discover a moving truth about their bond while their captor is away from home. Communication breaks down in the titular story, while sweat and marathon-training begin to replace anything verbal. But what if the couple had a baby? One that they found in an alley, sure, but which, for all intents and purposes, was theirs? The refrain of “what if” forms the bedrock of each story, propelling the collection forward. Lacroix’s writing is shot through with dark humour, shifting between the surreal, the unbelievable and the very likely. Even when stories slip far from reality, character insights are empathetic and grounding. Myriam, a big-deal CEO in “Anthropocene,” tells her employee (and plaything), Allison: “I thought if bad things happened to me, it must mean I’m a bad person. I think that’s what feels good about being submissive. If I’m not making any of the decisions, then I can’t be bad. For a few minutes or hours, I’m absolved.” In the final story, “The Feature,” the previous seven worlds inhabited by Myriam and Allison crash into one another. Here, Lacroix reveals the true nature of her characters who, having experienced an impressive range of alternative lives, from cannibalism to illegal parenting, come to understand the ways that circumstance can both be of consequence and of no consequence, and find out, of course, how it works out. —Dayna Mahannah