With little purpose in life, these predominantly male characters find themselves in pitiful settings on account of how the dice have been cast.
These stories are minimalist in style and description.
And yet it is the evocative, spare language that makes these pieces so darkly compelling.
In Sacraments, the banks have petrol-coloured ''science-fiction panes'' and the truculent detective looks like a ''shoulder-holstered Mormon''.
Another envisages a ''bleak Wonderland'' where blood turns to icy sludge.
These are dismal images indeed and between miscreants in Dr Seuss hats, Einsteins on the beach in women's sandals and presbyteries full of Russian seamen swarming we may well wonder if this world is real.
Yet with the ancient junkies, haunted actors, drunkards and law-fleeing priests there is a very real sense of immediacy and of an underground world just slightly off to the side of conventional life.
Cochrane paints vivid portraits of seedy hangouts of despair and hope; orphanages and mortuaries, dingy cinemas and Gothic churches, where gangsters and would-be directors stumble by.
A favourite image is of a writer's hovel featuring a red typewriter and a plastic daffodil in a Fanta bottle.
Cochrane does not waste words, and the images he chooses work to great effect.
• Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
