Nicole Flattery’s publisher paid big money for these debut stories (plus a novel-in-progress), and it’s not hard to see why: they’re often extremely funny – peculiar as well as ha-ha – and highly addictive. Here’s a bit from Not the End Yet, about a divorced teacher on a string of dates during an apocalypse: “There was always a moment... usually at the beginning, when she allowed herself to think: this guy’s the whole package! As the night progressed, the realisation invariably arrived that this man was not a package at all: he was an envelope, an envelope with a bill in it, an envelope she, quite frankly, wanted to put in a drawer and forget all about.”

Flattery’s themes are work, womanhood and early-to-midlife indirection, all tackled slantwise. An office worker develops a hunchback after her father’s death; in Abortion, a Love Story, a student receiving creepy emails tells her tutor she’s being watched:

Dr Carr leaned forward on the desk, as if preparing to deliver a sermon. He specialised in gender-studies. “Every woman in this country is being watched.”

“But I specifically feel like I’m being watched.”

They sat in silence.

It’s easy to read but trickier to get a handle on: Flattery’s off-kilter voice blends chatty candour and hard-to-interpret allegory (think Diane Williams or 90s Lorrie Moore), with the deadpan drollery and casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences.

As well as OTT description (“he looked like a small town I might live in and die”), and lines that wouldn’t have made sense a generation ago (someone buys books from “charity shops, some of which were highly complex pop-ups”), there’s some faintly dystopian set dressing; not only in Not the End Yet, where China is “wiped out”, but in the title story, about a motorway service station whose would-be employees must undergo all-night interviews designed, one lucky candidate suggests, “to break my spirit and ensure I pledged organisation and responsibility for the rest of my days”.

Often the protagonists are from small-town Ireland (like Flattery), trying to make a life in the city – Dublin, Paris or New York – and fretful of somehow being found out. A story about a woman looking after her husband’s nine-year-old child begins in a gallery: “Exhibitions were something she was trying, attempting to adjust to their sophistication, their unique shush. She moved up and down the staircase, cheapening the place with the cut of her clothes...”

Trauma lurks in the background, with allusions to attempted suicide, abuse and a 13-year-old’s miscarriage, in You’re Going to Forget Me Before I Forget You. Yet Flattery’s stories don’t depend on bringing such things to light; they’re just there – part of a woman’s life – which ultimately proves more disconcerting. Quips serve as a go-to anaesthetic: when someone says her ex-lover used to hit her in her sleep, she adds: “though I suppose I was just pretending to be asleep so it wasn’t totally honest of me either”.

If there’s a keynote here, it’s bravado. In Sweet Talk, a 14-year-old girl sets out to seduce the tradesman her parents hire to gut their kitchen. Left alone – not entirely plausibly – they watch The Exorcist, the narrator making sure to stay unshocked by Linda Blair spewing pea soup: “I wanted him to understand that you could fool other people but you couldn’t fool me.”

The story concludes with the girl, naked, hoping to surprise the tradesman in his trailer as dead flies ooze from her mouth – a startlingly bizarre image that nonetheless strikes you as a shrewdly cut corner. Flattery, though, doesn’t seem too bothered about sewn-up narratives running from A to B; it’s a mark of her art in these strange, darkly funny stories that we aren’t either.

• Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery is published by Bloomsbury Circus (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99