Snapshots of the Sadder Side of Summer : A QUICK KISS OF REDEMPTION & OTHER STORIES, <i> by David Means,</i> William Morrow, $18, 224 pages

The act of writing--maybe even more than the act of reading--can be a consolation. It isn’t particularly fashionable in the height of summer, when all around us people are going on vacation or, at the very least, out to a ballgame or the beach, to remember that a lot of us are depressed a lot of the time.

Perhaps high summer brings out this split in our own personalities: For every trip to the beach, there’s apt to be a traffic jam; for every party, a few hours of aching loneliness. And in our “summer reading� we see this reflection: Big, pleasing bestsellers where the reader doesn’t have to think much come out mostly in July and August, but those two months are filled as well with sad, small, cranky, hopeless volumes of short stories. They are appropriate, because in their very sadness, they’re apt to heal a wound.

You, gentle reader, are not the only one who thinks the whole world--except for you--is out there somewhere having fun. There are areas of sludge in every life.

This is a voice from deep sludge. If a couple is married in these stories, as in “The Myth of Devotion,� they won’t be married for long. If the years creep up on you, as in “The Strange Circumstances of Mr. Woodrow’s Death,� you can bet that loving relatives aren’t going to take care of you. No, it’s going to be the nursing home, with foul smells and bad tempers and a lonely death at the end.

Even if you have a relatively happy marriage, as in “Two Hearts Times Two,� the downside of a good marriage is that you really do get to be parted by death. The life of a widow or widower, especially in the downscale Midwestern towns that David Means writes about so beautifully, is desperately lonely; almost totally without event, an affectless hell.

If you have a relative such as the uncle in “The Library of Desire,� he won’t be the jolly uncle who takes you to a ballgame. He’ll be a desperately lonely man who dies surrounded by yellowed newspaper clippings. If you have a family in these stories, particularly in the brilliantly painful “The Question of Toby,� it will be a tacky, shabby family riddled by badly kept secrets and sickening hypocrisy.

In two heartbreaking tales here, the material is so agonizing that the reader guesses the writer can hardly deal with it, something like jamming his fist into a Cuisinart and holding it there. In “A Matter of Direction� and “Her Story With Mine,� the narrator recalls moments when his own life has intersected with his sister’s. That sister, barely seen and heavily drugged, is mentally ill and absolutely helpless against her illness. Any love, any affection is stifled, buried in heartbreak.

It takes considerable artistry to rise above this kind of material; to take scenes of such flat desolation and make them alive and somehow un -sad enough that the reader won’t throw down the book and burst into tears.

Means pokes through these lonely, little towns, looks at these isolated people with controlled detachment and a kind of grim glee: Life is not what the beer ads on television would have us believe. It isn’t all back-lit teen-agers swimming in sparkling rivers. It’s two guys kissing sadly in a drab back yard. A divorcee trying to kill a school of bluegill by dropping an anchor in the water again and again. It’s tornadoes and houses that lean a little to the side. And the torrid affair you end up having will be with a “hefty woman verging on obese.�

There are two kinds of summer: that back-lit fantasy we wait for all year and the other one. These stories are for when you’re sweating through the other one.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality� by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (Summit).