Two pairs of eyes meet in a cozy bookstore on a rainy day; an elderly father resists his son’s pleas for a nursing home; a long-lost childhood sweetheart just can’t be forgotten. The images that frame Abby Geni’s upcoming short story collection, The Body Farm, are familiar to us: we have read them, heard them, seen them before. This familiarity is at times deliberate, evocative, as in “Mother, Sister, Wife, Daughter,” a story that is haunted by the specter of Beauty and the Beast — family of daughters, voyaging father, huge mansion — and enriched by its mythical, fairy-tale quality. On other occasions, the initially familiar is taken to fantastic extremes: in “Petrichor,” an Asian virus attacks not only smell and taste but also hearing, sight, and touch; in “The Body Farm,” violent thoughts against a lifelong stalker materialize at the hands of a forensic scientist.

But where the narratives in The Body Farm often offer unexpected, meaningful conceits and developments, the characters that populate Geni’s stories are almost drawn from stock: the Type-A accountant brother with high blood pressure and allergies as against his happy-go-lucky, outdoorsy sister; the overintellectualizing psychologists, who “wore glasses,” “routinely left half-empty coffee cups and half-finished books all around the house,” and talk exclusively in psychoanalytic jargon like “panacea” and “undifferentiated ego mass”; the exploring teen who sounds eerily like a regurgitated sex-ed pamphlet (“I’ll let you know if I’m ever feeling more like they/them, but I really like he/him […] Not demiboy, but fully male”). In the hackneyed relationships, reactions, and dialogues of its characters, Geni’s writing threatens to slip down undigested.

If The Body Farm does not serve up particularly complex food for thought, however, it certainly makes itself profoundly felt in the body. The intimacy with which Geni draws us into lives and minds is deeply affective in spite of — or perhaps precisely because of — the familiarity of our encounter. One finds oneself reacting in an inexplicably physical manner. The reconciliation of siblings draws out real tears even as it progresses predictably to its happily-ever-after ending; the trope of the “perfect murder” yet sends electrical thrills down the spine. This is not to say that these stories are deeply tragic or suspenseful; instead, there is a strange power in them that bypasses both thought and emotion to summon involuntary bodily response. As a reader, you tear up even as you scoff at a cliché; you shiver even as you know what comes next.

This is a surprising and singular effect, and indeed an apt one for a book that focuses on the primacy of the body. The Body Farm insists on our inextricable connection to and dependence on our own physicalities, even within our 21st-century society of technology and excess in which we seem to float further beyond corporeal reality with every tap and click. Even as we consume more information than ever before, there is a loss of touch with the world we appear to know so much about. Lost in the woods, the planetary geologist in “Starlike” “know[s] about the helium rain […] that falls on Jupiter”; she knows “that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year”; but, she says, “I do not know the way back to my brother-in-law’s house.” It is this sense of alienation from our physical surroundings, our loss of immediate and local knowledge, that characterizes our modern condition and that is resisted by Geni’s celebration of the physical, the corporeal, the meaty, in The Body Farm. From the very first passage, we are plunged into the world of the senses with the “sticky second skin” of a wetsuit, a sunset that “stain[s] the sky,” a ship’s steady “chugging toward shore”. Once again it is precisely our familiarity with these images and sensations that renders them evocative: well do we know the brilliant colors of the setting sun, the tactile discomfort of a soaked suit, the rumble of a motor through waves.

Throughout her stories, Geni juggles virtual, detached knowledge with this sensory and corporeal way of knowing. As against the psychoanalytic theories offered by her parents, the young protagonist of “Selkie” intimately knows her sister as a physical being, entangled together naked and drenched on her kid-sized mattress, or hands grasped on top of each other to draw together. In “Porcupines in Trees,” Lila leaves behind the “ambient city glow” of New York and the “clipped, clinical tones” of a GPS for the rustic environment of a cabin in the woods. “Her experience with the forest,” Geni writes, “begins and ends with horror films.” This mediated, detached urban knowledge of the natural world is replaced in the story with real encounters, whose immediacy and palpability lend magic to mere interaction. Breathlessly observing a porcupine, Lila “experiences a jolt as the animal’s gaze brushes her body”: the body encounters other bodies, touches them, and reacts palpably as it cannot in modern urban society. The Body Farm revels not so much in the creation of the new as much as it serves as a reminder of the corporeality that was and is always there. We are reminded of, as the blurb puts it, “our physical vessels [in] our physical world,” both through the focus of the stories and the firsthand bodily effects they mete on the reader as we cry, laugh, and shiver at resurfaced sensations. The Body Farm recalls, rebalances, reconnects: it is a book that comes after but looks to what came before, tracing us back to childhood, myth, and the physical reality that grounds it all.

“The body cannot tell any lies,” reads the back of the book. If so, The Body Farm is a gentle harbinger of a truth we already know. Looked at too hard, Geni’s stories sink into cliché; instead, the all-too-familiar moments of recognition must be relaxed into, accepted, embraced, as one gives oneself over to a story told over the bonfire or well-thumbed fairytale at bedtime, long ago. As our eyes skim over the pages and our fingers graze paper and ink, the mind is left behind for a remembrance of the body we have, perhaps, forgotten.