The second act of Lauren Groff’s career—from the plot twist that comes halfway through her third novel Fates and Furies to the present—concerns characters whose lives have been destroyed. Her fiction is populated with young widows and victims of sexual abuse, with junkies and refugees. And yet as reality-shattering as these plots can be, Groff is morbidly interested in the flip side of such brutality: the blank slate, the freedom, that only losing everything can afford.

I hesitate to call what these characters experience trauma—although, obviously, it is—because of how the past fifteen years of literary fiction have co-opted what Parul Sehgal famously called the trauma plot. Groff avoids the easy narrative causality that essay described, and what happens to her characters is less coherent, at once disorienting and sublime. They become forcefully untethered, flung into an alternate reality. Crisis turns these characters into something like world-weary children, terrified and (rightfully) guarded, but granted a totally new perspective on the world around them. There’s a sense of magic in how the rules governing everyday life, once taken for granted, have suddenly been rewritten.

Brawler, Groff’s third collection of short stories, both homes in on this theme and subverts it. “To Sunland” is told from the perspective of an autistic twenty-year-old named Buddy as his sister, Joanie, escorts him across 1950s Florida. The siblings’ mother has just died, and with a college scholarship offer on the table, Joanie makes the impossible decision to institutionalize Buddy, a fate their mother had spent her whole life fighting. The story is quiet, but violence lurks in the contours of what’s unsaid—between Joanie and a predatory teacher who offers the siblings a ride, then again on a Greyhound to Gainesville, when an old woman on the bus steals cash out of Joanie’s wallet while Buddy watches, knowing he won’t tell. Stuck in this communicative limbo—where no one is able or cares enough to listen to him—Buddy’s mind lingers on unexpected beauty in the world around him. Out the bus’s windows, the “scrabbling cypresses with their feet in the water became a blur of gray and shining brown,” and at the gates of Sunland, the hospital where’s he about to be admitted, Joanie “who smelled like sweat and onions and like herself rose up and kissed him on the cheek.”

In another story, “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” Groff plays with the allure of the blank slate as self-punishment, a form of repentance. Pushing fifty and about to retire, protagonist Eliza finds herself sexually frustrated in midlife. While her husband Willie—in his early forties and, in Eliza’s mind, still very vigorous and handsome—continues life as usual, retirement reminds Eliza of her mortality. The free time she’s suddenly found herself with feels like a cage. Stuck in the finally-complete fixer-upper Victorian whose restoration had been the couple’s passion project Eliza understands that this comfort means that the best days of her life are behind her. “What she wouldn’t give to be in a tight crawl space, sprinkled with squirrel turds, running wire,” she realizes, looking back on her and Willie’s youth. “Now all she had to look forward to was rest.” Eliza is prepared spend the rest of her life like this, until Willie signs her up for a variety of continuing education classes, which brings Bet, the instructor of a gardening class who has a slippery relationship with gender and sexuality, into their lives.

At an earlier point in her career, Groff might have leaned more fully into the story’s gothic imagery, charting a contrast between Eliza and the stoically-decaying Victorian. But the version of the story here, in Brawler, ends on a different note, one that’s almost romantic. Eliza—depressed at home, then again when she’s on the verge of acting on her crush on Bet—is twice tempted by the reflex to blow up her life, to start anew rather than sit with uncomfortable feelings. And yet both times she’s stopped, rescued, reaffirmed, by Willie. The impulse is only imagined, not actualized. Upheaval looms, seductively, but ultimately recedes.

The publication of Brawler comes between the second and third books of what Groff has described as a trilogy about women and faith in history. Matrix, the first of these novels, is a fictionalized account of Marie de France, a French abbess exiled to a convent in Norman England who—at least in Groff’s telling—transforms her order of nuns into a feminist utopia whose religious practice borders on the psychedelic. The second, The Vaster Wilds, follows a servant who has run away from her master, a tyrannical minister in colonial Jamestown. The girl spends nearly the whole novel starving and battered by the inhospitable landscape around her, and yet she takes a lonely solace in her faith, which she views as distinct from the godlessness of both the New World and her English-born masters. As in Matrix, the girl’s relationship with Christianity has a heady, nondenominational quality—more interested in visions and ecstatic accounts of bodily suffering than doctrine.

These novels stand out in Groff’s oeuvre. They’re more difficult—both in subject matter and style—than the work that made Groff famous. It’s heartening to see as prominent a literary novelist as Groff attempt such a radical shift in subject matter, instead of publishing endless iterations of Fates and Furies-type domestic dramas. If these earlier works played with mundane themes in the larger-than-life register of fairy tales, and her current trilogy-in-progress is concerned with religion more explicitly, then the stories of Brawler can be understood to chart this transformation.

This is most apparent in the collection’s final story, “Annunciation,” framed as a middle-aged woman’s memories from her years as a quasi-runaway in San Francisco. The eldest daughter of a large, dysfunctional family, the narrator disappears without a word after graduating from college, driving across the country in her dead grandfather’s Buick and selling it for cash as soon as she gets to the Bay. She spends a month wandering the streets and sleeping in hostels, enjoying her new life “swept clean of family and friends, an emptiness that [she] could fill in whatever way [she] wished.”

The emptiness doesn’t last for long. The narrator soon becomes entangled in the lives of two women. The first, Griselda, is her landlord. Griselda is an elderly German immigrant, living alone in a house full of memories, other people’s salvaged garbage, and a monstrously large dog. With her thick accent and elaborate tall tales—of being a child heiress in pre-Nazi Germany, of wild parties with Andy Warhol, of a stint as an Ivy League philosopher—Griselda reminds the reader of Groff’s instinct for the darkly whimsy of fairy tales. She’s a witch, outside of time, an arbiter of fate, doling out rewards and punishments with the fantastical illogic of a Brothers Grimm tale. This subplot comes to an abrupt end when the narrator finds Griselda passed out in their shared yard, her head cracked on a paving stone, with only the exposed soles of her purple slippers to show where she landed. It’s a larger-than-life demise for a woman who figured herself a modern-day Wicked Witch of the West (Coast).

Griselda’s arc is contrasted with the narrator’s relationship with a woman named Anais, who, to the narrator, “looked like something more biblical, a Judith or Esther […] a prophetess, a martyr, a believer who loved the ache in her knees after a long session of prayer.” She and Anais meet as temps at a menial data entry job, digitizing the notes of Child Protective Services workers for the city government, and quickly become friendly. Anais is also eccentric, swallowing spoonfuls of turmeric as medicine and, as she eventually confides in the narrator, choosing to live transiently with her young daughter in a converted van. The narrator is struck by Anais’s determination, both a source of strength and glaring weakness. Anais confides that she’s a devoted listener of an evangelic preacher who is, in the narrators’ mind, a charlatan, hawking new age health cures and shaking his followers down for money. When Anais was still a mystery—defiant, unknowable—the narrator found her impressive, a living avatar of the stoic self-sufficiency she herself is seeking. But to the narrator, Anais’s devotion to the radio preacher is a crack in that façade, one that reveals her scared, human core.

“Groff’s latest batch of stories is masterful. They have a spiritual depth that’s searching, not didactic. And they avoid the trap of much religiously-inflected fiction—the impulse towards the epic. No matter how lofty its themes, Groff’s work remains mired in the muck and the mud of human existence.”

If the two strands in “Annunciation” say anything, especially when considered alongside Brawler as a whole and the rest of Groff’s recent work, it’s that faith can be perilous. Whether considering the gleefully haunted tall tales spun by Griselda or Anais , the narrator understands that people establish their lives on shaky foundations. To be faithful is to leave yourself vulnerable, at risk of being exploited or outright lied to. A safer option, she thinks, is to turn away from others, to run, to start fresh alone and untethered. Such a life keeps you in the driver’s seat of your own life, no grand narrative needed. And yet it’s depressingly anti-social: no one else can ruin your life if you’ve already blown it up yourself.

“Annunciation” punctuates both Brawler as a collection and all of Groff’s recent work on fate and faith. She has always been a brilliant line-level writer—grounding her ethereal, myth-like language with jarringly-contemporary turns of phrase, crafting syntax that reads as guarded and vulnerable as her characters feel. This latest batch of stories is masterful. They have a spiritual depth that’s searching, not didactic. And they avoid the trap of much religiously-inflected fiction—the impulse towards the epic. No matter how lofty its themes, Groff’s work remains mired in the muck and the mud of human existence.