In The Evil B.B. Chow, his latest collection of short stories, Almond picks up where he left off with his previous collection, My Life in Heavy Metal. This time around, the emotional territory of the stories is not so limited as it was in Heavy Metal - it’s not all about sex this time - but the intellectual substance of B.B. Chow is as undiluted as anything Almond has written before. These are the stories of an older writer, or they seem so at least, and Almond stretches his ambitions a little wider, creating characters who represent human states beyond the romantic/psychosexual realm that was predominant in the earlier book. Sometimes that means that the stories in B.B. Chow are not quite as sharp and fresh as the earlier pieces, but for the most part they serve to remind us that people (the interesting ones, anyway) have more than one driving urge.

Keeping that in mind, it must be said that there’s no shortage of sexual exploration in the stories of B.B. Chow. The topic is taken on directly in “Appropriate Sex,” in which a college creative writing professor encounters the sexual hang-ups and peccadilloes of his students. Sex pops up repeatedly in other stories; it’s one of the reasons a hip magazine editor unwisely falls for an overly sensitive medical intern in the title story, and it’s the reason an affection-starved young woman becomes infatuated with a middle-aged computer repairman in “Wired for Life.” In the book’s remarkable final story, “Skull,” Almond makes the extremely bold move of basing the tale on the revelation between friends of a particularly stomach-turning sexual kink practiced by one of the pair. Instead of doing what many lesser writers would do - using the sexual deviancy to illustrate the darkness lurking beneath the normal facade of typical Americans - Almond does the opposite: he explains, with astonishing success, how a chill-inducing behavioral quirk can be emblematic of touching intimacy.

But as is true of all Almond’s writing, nothing in the book is only about sex. These are stories about longing and loneliness; “A Happy Dream” is a poignant vignette about a man’s timid wish for spontaneity, and “Summer, As in Love” is about the way that life inevitably winds down, and that loss invariably follows moments of pure, physical joy.

Some of the stories are not about sex at all (imagine that), and these are (unfortunately) the most uneven of the lot. “Lincoln, Arisen,” the collection’s centerpiece, is a lengthy meditation on the president and his relationship with Frederick Douglass; it is ambitious and thoughtful, if a tad dry. “I Am as I Am” depicts the intrusion of tragedy on the circumscribed lives of suburban Americans, and it veers dangerously close to the suburbs-as-oppressive-hell clichČ; only Almond’s skilled hand at the wheel keeps the story from going all the way down that road.

When he’s not being insightful and sexually adventurous, Almond is extremely funny, and a couple of the stories cross over into pure comedy. “The Soul Molecule” concerns a man who discovers that not only does an old friend believe that he’s been abducted by aliens, but the friend’s entire family believe that they’ve been swiped by extraterrestrials as well. “Larsen’s Novel” is a broadly comic piece about two dentists, one of whom is asked by the other to read and critique an exceptionally bad novel he has written. It’s hilarious, but it’s not one-dimensional; Almond has constructed here a warm, generous story about the nature of creativity, mediocrity, ambition, legacy and acceptance.

If there’s an overarching theme in B.B. Chow, it has little to do with sex. Rather, the stories are more about compassion and empathy, about how we’d all do well to acknowledge that everyone else struggles just as much as we do, if not more.