In 2021, Harper’s Magazine won the National Magazine Award in fiction for three pieces including Hilary Leichter’s “Terrace Story.” The short story was every reader’s dream — enigmatic, tightly written and infused with a fizzy mix of chaos and wonder not often seen in contemporary fiction.

As these award-winning stories sometimes do, it attracted a flurry of attention (mine included) and spawned a full-length book, out this month. The speculative novel is an inventive, wonky meditation on belonging and loneliness, grief and loss that both puzzles the mind and pierces the heart.

“Terrace Story” unfolds in four interconnected vignettes. For the uninitiated, the first story is a retelling of the Harper’s piece in all its unsettling glory: Annie, Edward, and baby Rose — a young couple and their newborn — move into a cramped city apartment following a rent hike. For Annie, the poky flat is a discomfiting eyesore: “Secretly, she felt that their lack of space probably signaled her lack of promise, a final judgment on her priorities and half-hewn choices.”

The story abruptly shifts and lays out every shoebox-renter’s dream when Annie’s co-worker, the presumably single Stephanie, comes over for dinner and opens what is normally a coat closet door to reveal a gorgeous, plant-filled terrace with sweeping views. The kicker? It only appears when Stephanie is in residence and disappears when she’s gone.

Such a peculiar setup soon gives rise to all sorts of prickly predicaments: Are Annie and Edward monsters because they blatantly use Stephanie for terrace access, even after Stephanie is handed Annie’s clients at work and Annie gets fired? More dramatically: Is Stephanie justified in the story’s finale when she shuts the terrace door on Annie — an action that causes irreparable consequences.

As a short story, “Terrace Story” works because of its shock factor — and because it gives readers ample agency to decide each character’s fate according to how much sympathy we feel the characters deserve.

But what was left up to our imagination (and conscience) in the Harper’s version is fully explored in “Terrace Story” the novel. The result is both delightful and a little befuddling.

第三,惊人的故事,“堡垒”。在end of the Harper’s story, we don’t know Annie and Edward’s destinies, but we do have a few clues about the connection between the dreamlike world of the terrace and decidedly weird Stephanie. In “Fortress,” however, Stephanie’s ache-inducing backstory and motivations are revealed, including her fraught relationship with her parents and the death of her younger sister, a lonely college experience, and an ill-fated relationship with a boy named Will who selfishly uses her ability to magically manipulate time and space for his own benefit.

It’s this explanation of her gift, for example, that not only adds depth to Stephanie’s personality, but also makes her shutting the terrace door on Annie seem simultaneously tragic and even reasonable: “Stephanie would have told (Will) it was because of a craving, a longing, so deep inside her that it was outside her body. A place to put all the wanting.”

In contrast to these zippy first and third pieces that dovetail nicely together, the second and fourth sections feel slightly untethered. The meandering second story titled “Folly” tracks the unhappy relationship of George and Lydia — characters we have a reason for caring about, though that reason is not immediately clear. Wet-blanket Lydia’s incessant preoccupation with death, the birth of their daughter Anne, and an embedded fairy tale about a king and philandering queen (though pitch-perfect in tone) only add to the confusion.

The final story, “Cantilever,” though firmly rooted in its richly described space-station setting — “concentric circles of tiny single-person homes, like a sleek Levittown in the sky” — ironically lacks enough heft to fully get off the ground. Once again, Leichter plays with the space-time continuum to explore Rose’s (yes, that Rose) later years, but the too-brief mention of her space-traveling girlfriend and a mysterious older visitor looking to settle in Rose’s community, for example, trigger more unanswered questions rather than fill in gaps.

Still, with its overlapping characters and quirky (presumably intentional) plot hiccups, “Terrace Story” is an impressive literary feat, if only because Leichter doesn’t shy away from taking stylistic chances and drops Easter eggs whenever and wherever she feels like it. After all, she reminds us, “Some views show less than half of what needs seeing.”

Alexis Burling is a freelance writer.