A lexandra Leggat’s second collection of short fiction is more than just an homage to the automobile. In these 13 urban tales, the car figures as character, theme, and symbol. In “Impala,” the car assumes its own personality while parked in a couple’s garage. In “The Car,” it acts as a wife’s refuge from her husband and their failed marriage.

In many of these stories a car brings characters together and separates them, becoming a four-wheeled stand-in in people’s troubled lives, transporting and transforming their destinies in an instant. The characters in Leggat’s stories are at the end of the road, living in a way that is both poignant and absurd, searching for meaning and authenticity in a world fraught with loss and abandonment.

Leggat’s greatest strength is her careful attention to her characters’ voices, most notably in the gentle “Galloway” and the hazily surrealist “A Time I Never Knew.” Leggat’s style is dominated by sparse, clean prose, with short, staggered sentences that make the stories pulse with a quirky, restless energy. She takes intimate snapshots of life’s crummy little moments: sleeping with strangers in sleazy motels, working in dead-end jobs – all the slummy glitz of the world captured in a single sentence.

Many of the stories in Meet Me in the Parking Lot end abruptly, with Leggat’s characters suddenly realizing the sharp truths of their lives. Like a car veering too near the edge of a cliff, these stories both thrill and frighten, instilling a peculiar sense of vertigo.