Mapping the Heart’s Lonely Landscape : THE LONELIEST ROAD IN AMERICA: Stories by Roy Parvin; Chronicle 193 pages, $11.95

How old is this kid everyone’s talking about, anyway? He’s grinning off the back cover like he couldn’t possibly understand the scar-tissue layers of pain and loss he writes about. From the looks of him, you could not drink this boy under the table. You’d tell him your most horrible memory six beers in, and right about nine he’d get up to go write it down. “This is his first book,” someone wrote on the back cover over a quote from Fenton Johnson that uses words like “mythology” and “astonishing” and “heart-stopping.” First book, 87th lifetime.

The stories are set in the Trinity Alps, in many ways the soul of Northern California, a region known for its ragged beauty, its marijuana and its ornery inhabitants. Roy Parvin claims it for his own. When his characters travel, it’s to San Francisco, or Colorado, or Alaska. Some have memories of cities, but they are quickly erased by the woods, by “a ghosted splinter of moon hanging in an eggshell sky,” stars that “leaked into the night sky,” falling “northwest like a white thread pulling in the dark,” by warblers “describing pinwheels,” or “a handful of towns taking root under the old growth forest.” See what I mean?

Almost all of Parvin’s characters have these things running through them; have, in other words, a wildness running through them. There’s the poet Gavin, “who knew then there were hooves running inside him, knew they were running through snow and ice”; Quimby, a Wintu Indian, a “born-in-the-woods, a tintailtcwen,” in whom “darkness runs . . . like a horse”; and Delmont, a trapper who never was “in the horse sense of the word, never properly broken.”

In fact, most of Parvin’s characters never were properly broken. They belong more to the place and to their own always-haunting memories than they do to the present or the people around them. And for good reason. The people around them almost always abandon them, especially when they are children. What’s left in most of them is a set of tactics to survive by, a yearning for tenderness, a few good memories, and pain. They are, most of them, as bloody as wild horses just before they are broken.

One of the many astonishing things about this first book (don’t hate him because he’s talented) is how complete, how memorable, how dimensional Parvin’s characters are. Even the walk-ons, the cameos, dig in. In “Ice the Color of Sky,” the poet Gavin flies to his brother’s funeral. A woman sits next to him, an Alaskan woman who says, after the meals are handed out, “ ‘You have a sadness.’ A black gap from a missing bicuspid sneaked into her smile.” And a few pages later, “The laser green of her eyes stayed, a glimmering afterimage.” I cannot forget her, maybe it’s the northern lights.

I also will never forget May, in the story of the same name, who walks away from an accident involving a car and a river with a dim memory of a husband and a little girl and an address book. “She could remember as far back as 2 1/2 years ago, the day she stepped out of the swollen river, the rapids running crazy, she covered in blood and mucus like a newborn, but no more. Two weeks later was when she became May.”

And I will remember Katy, the autistic daughter of Quimby in “Darkness Runs.” When she is taken from her father (“5 or 6 years old. . . . Bruises like squashed plums ran up her legs and covered her belly and bottom”) by the social worker narrator and placed on a farm, she proceeds, even tethered to a fence, to eviscerate goats and terrorize the family. The child abuse that runs through these stories takes many forms, never goes away and always bites back.

Once in a while, Parvin tries to wrest humor from desperate situations: A bear falls into the well of a woman who has had an extramarital affair in “A Dream She Had”; a father who knits and means well is sent by his family to live outside the house in a tent after he is caught spying (accidentally) on his son and stepdaughter in “It’s Me Again.” But these are not my favorites. Maybe it’s the holidays, but Parvin has convinced me that we are not, after all, in control of our lives. We faithfully await his novels.