When I first read a story by Christopher Coake, I had a feeling that must be similar to what a teacher or coach might get to feel every once in a great while. As the series editor for Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American Mystery Stories,” I probably read a thousand stories a year – and this is after my invaluable colleague, Michele Slung, has culled an additional two or three thousand that weren’t suitable.

As is true of most things in life, many of the stories were absolutely terrible, many more were pedestrian, some were pretty good, and a few were outstanding. Students come along this way, too, and so do athletes. But at some moments, when the planets are aligned properly, or God decides to show off a little, something sublime occurs.

A scholar appears who gets it, every time, apparently without effort. He becomes the Albert Einstein of physics, or the Banesh Hoffman of mathematics. A young musician picks up a violin and becomes Joshua Bell or Itzhak Perlman. A boy starts to play ball and develops into Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. The teacher or coach who finds these prodigies recognizes them instantly, their gifts so obvious only the brain-dead and the head of the teachers’ union can fail to recognize that something special is happening.

That “eureka” thrill of discovery is what I felt when I read the short story “All Through the House” by Mr. Coake, whose first book, “We’re in Trouble” (Harcourt, 306 pages, $23), has just been published.

Now, I am forced to acknowledge I didn’t actually discover Mr. Coake. He had a professor who worked with him on the story, an editor who published it in the Gettysburg Review, an agent who signed him before I read the story. And dozens of people (well, hundreds, it seems, if you look at the three solid pages of people he charmingly thanks at the back of his book) were supportive and will lay some claim to discovering him. Every failure is an orphan; every success has a thousand fathers (I think Charlie Chan said that).

But it is with “All Through the House” that I found Mr. Coake, and it is the final story of the seven long tales his masterly new collection comprises. “All Through the House” is the story of a sad, awful murder, in which an entire family is killed before the one who pulled the trigger – again and again – turns the gun toward himself. It is a heartbreaking story, utterly shocking, told in reverse order, from the present day back to the day of the mass slayings.

When you read a few lines that suggest or summarize a plot, it generally feels familiar. You have the sense you’ve read the story before, or something so much like it that you see no reason to go further, to seek out this particular story and give it an hour of your life. In this case you would be making a mistake. One tricky thing about reviewing mystery fiction is to not give away too much. There is so much more I’d like to say about this poetic narrative, but I am frozen with fear that I’ll say something that will spoil it for you, so I’ll just shut up (for once).

All the stories in “We’re in Trouble” are powerful and beautifully written, though they are not all mystery fiction. In “A Single Awe,” a young woman decides to marry a man because he once behaved heroically, risking his life to save someone else. Having intended to end their relationship on the very night of this singular occurrence, she instead agrees to marries him, consigning herself to a series of unshakably mild disappointments and regret.

The title story is a suite of three separate tales, all of which are about love. In the third, an elderly man, suffering from a painful terminal illness, asks his wife to help him die. They have made love that night, as much as possible, when he tells the woman he loves that he’s ready:

My love, he says, it’s time.
She takes a breath.
I knew you’d say it now, she says.
She kisses his forehead and sits up, and looks at him. Her face is bleary, her hair a silvery mist.
Please, she says, wait a day.

She wavers between helping him to end the suffering and wanting just a little more time with her husband. If you can read this story with dry eyes, you can congratulate yourself for having what it takes to be a prison guard.

These stories are filled with fear and with love, frequently connected in terrifying ways. The intense passion of one person for another drives them, and the endings are not always what one expects, or what one would wish. In “Solos,” a woman waits for her husband as he climbs a particularly dangerous mountain and is filled with terror and with love, but also with rage at his selfishness for risking his life and possibly leaving her and her son forever.

The lyricism of Mr. Coake’s prose, the intensity of the emotions it arouses, the predicaments in which his characters find themselves, and the resolutions they find for themselves, will make you feel like you’ve been standing on the ledge of a 50-story building during a hurricane. It will take a long time for you to forget the experience.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.