“I made myself wake up and we took our blankets and pillows off our beds and walked to the beach. We lay down on one blanket and put the other one over us. Petey lay down on top, with his butt on me and his head on Noah.

Soon there was the faintest glow at the end of the water. I propped myself up on my elbows. The sun came up slowly and then quickly. And Noah was right, it did make me feel a little bit better.”

The characters in Lauren Holmes’s Barbara the Slut and Other People often appear shallow. Their desires are ruled by basic animal needs for love and sex. As desperately as they hope to connect, they often relate better to their pets than the humans they find themselves associated with. For this reason, the stories in this collection might seem bleak, but in fact they are entertaining and funny. While the characters often appear far from relatable, by the end of the story, the plot shifts, and the reader is suddenly empathetic to their cause.

Unlike most short story collections I have read, Holmes’s stories feel highly interconnected. The characters are not the same, yet they are flawed in similar ways. Almost all of Holmes’s stories feature a dog, one more understanding to the character’s pain then even her family or friends. Holmes even includes a more experimental story at the end of the book, “My Humans,” told from a dog’s point of view.

Some of the most thoughtful pieces in the collection are unexpectedly touching. For example, “Desert Hearts” tells the story of recent law school graduate, Brenda, who moves to San Francisco with her fiancé. Unsure of what to do with her life, she takes a job at a gay sex toy store, posing as a lesbian. While some of the story is funny, the reader feels little sympathy for Brenda at the start. Although she clearly feels lost, Brenda also lies to her boss and coworkers about her true identity.

At the end of the story, Brenda is confronted by her father at the sex toy store. Her boss, Pam, mistakes the conversation for one of a different nature. “He doesn’t deserve to have you as a daughter,” Pam tells Brenda once her father leaves. “Yeah, that wasn’t about me being gay,” Brenda says to her boss. After Brenda tells Pam the truth—that she lied about being gay—she asks Pam if she’s fired. “I think so, yes,” Pam tells her.

The story might end there, but it goes further. Brenda’s neglectful fiancé takes her to buy a pet at an animal shelter, and the dog, sickly and small, clutches to Brenda. “When everything was settled we got a cab and I cried all the way home,” writes Holmes. “The dog sat on my lap, shaking.”

Most of the pieces in this collection seem similar to each other in tone. While reading, the stories almost run together, but in a seamless, artful way. The collection also includes “Mike Anonymous,” a story about a girl, Vivian, who works at an STD clinic, and “Weekend with Beth, Kelly, Muscle, and Pammy,” about a guy named Jason who invites his college friend, Beth, over for the weekend. Unsure if he is attracted to or disgusted by his friend, Jason is ultimately unable to connect with her. Instead, he cuddles with the dog, Pammy, at the end of the story.

Perhaps the best stories in Holmes’s collection are the first and last, “How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?” and “Barbara the Slut.” In the first story, a girl named Lala tries to come out to her mom in Mexico while her mother seems more interested in selling Victoria’s Secret underwear and meeting up with her boyfriend. “Barbara the Slut” is about a high school girl, called a slut for sleeping with and then refusing to sleep with the boys at her school.

“They called me Barbara the Slut,” Holmes writes. “It started in eleventh grade, and they called me other names, too—ho, whore, skank, Barbara Lewinsky, sticky-fingers Murphy—but mostly they called me slut.”

Holmes’s short stories work because they portray each character’s complexity while also showing their inability to connect. The stories are funny but poignant. The characters portrayed are distinct in their isolation, yet Holmes convinces us there is nothing truly unique about their despair.