THE HALF-MAMMALS OF DIXIE

The oddball characters in Singleton’s second short-story collection share a distinctive thread: They all seem to have loser written across their foreheads. In ”Deer Gone,” a detention-center guard’s smoothly organized afternoon of adultery is interrupted by some runaway inmates. In ”Answers,” a couple tackling an At-Home Marriage Repair kit gets distracted into playing Twenty Questions. Mostly set in and around the fictional town of Forty-Five, S.C., Singleton’s relentlessly offbeat stories are a miasma of flea markets, palm readers, bowling alleys, and alligators, offering a disturbingly askew — at times, downright surreal — vision of the South.