Once upon our time

The distinguished British scholar, critic and novelist A.S. Byatt acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of the blackout and blitz in World War II. To this day, this Victorian postmodernist is an aficionado of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Although Byatt is best known for the Booker Award-winning 1990 scholarly romance “Possession” and four overstuffed Frederica Potter novels of ideas set in the 1950s and 1960s (“The Virgin in the Garden,” “Still Life,” “Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Woman”), she also has written her own fabulist tales over the years. In her first collection, “Sugar and Other Stories” (1987), she made reference to otherworldly creatures “gesticulating on the fringed edge” of the consciousness of a schoolgirl studying Racine.

In “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (1997), she moved purely into the fairy tale realm, writing of princesses and dragons and a modern-day Scheherazade. (The title story begins, “Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings ... there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy. Her business was storytelling.”)

In “Little Black Book of Stories” Byatt continues her reinvention of the fairy tale, focusing on the darker mysteries of madness, violence, grief and transformation and using the uncanny power of language to reach deep into the imagination, thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

“The Thing in the Forest,” the volume’s most traditional tale, is chilling enough to provoke nightmares. The story begins simply (“There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest”) then moves with precise rhythm into the savage alien world that appears when “the corner of the blanket that covered the unthinkable” has been turned back.

Two London schoolgirls, Penny and Primrose, are among the legions of young wartime evacuees sent to the countryside for their safety. Their mothers have been unable to explain the horrors they might face. (“How do you say to your child, I am sending you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am staying here ... ?”) Instead, they say nothing at all. The girls fear that they and the other children are being punished. The pair stick together, each feeling that the other is “nice,” and after a night in a country estate, they set out to explore the forest behind the house.

We are comfortable in the cradle of this familiar structure. We know the rules. Something will happen soon. That is part of the delicious terror the darkness evokes. The forest rustles. There is a great wave of noise and foul odor, “the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.” Crouching, the two little girls tremble as the “Thing” appears. It is a distinctly female creature with a head like a “monstrous turnip” and an expression of “pure misery.” It drags itself forward on powerful forearms “like a cross between a monstrous washerwoman and a primeval dragon.” Its tubular body trails “bits of wire-netting, foul dishcloths, wire-wool full of pan-scrubbings, rusty nuts and bolts.” The “Thing” the little girls see brings to mind the dreaded devouring mother who lurks in the darkness, updated by Byatt here and festooned with the trappings of slovenly housekeeping. Indeed, the “Thing” could be thought of as the awful shadow to the “Angel in the House,” the Victorian ideal of the pure and selfless homemaker that Virginia Woolf sought to exorcise. The image Byatt evokes would be comic if it were not so terrifying.

The two girls make their way safely out of the forest, but not before learning how deadly the “Thing” can be. They do not speak again, until they bump into each other some 40 years later, on a house tour of the same estate on the lip of the forest. “They established the skein of coincidence -- dead fathers, unmarried status, child-caring professions, recently dead mothers.” The encounter with the “Thing” has haunted each of them for decades. Penny is a psychotherapist working with severely autistic children; Primrose is a kindergarten storyteller crafting tales that keep the children feeling safe. Each is a witness for the other that the “Thing” was real. And now it is time to confront it again as adults, each in her own way.

Another story, “Body Art,” revolves around a homeless young art student and a 40ish gynecologist. The pierced and tattooed Daisy literally falls into Damian’s life one Christmas, fainting from lack of food while on a ladder hanging decorations in the gynecology ward at St. Pantaleon’s, where he works. The hospital setting has its own uncanny qualities. Its founder left for public consumption his collection of strange and gruesome artifacts of surgical and gynecologic history, including “shelves of artificial nipples, lead and silver, rubber and bakelite” and curiosities like miniatures of females with removable insides. Daisy has been a patient here (a botched abortion led to the loss of an ovary) and she has been squatting in the sub-basement where the collection is housed. She transforms bits she has scavenged into a provocative art piece depicting the four-armed goddess Kali. Meanwhile, Damian takes her in, and she creeps into his bed for several nights.

Byatt layers “Body Art” with lists: She devotes pages to detailing the medical curiosities in the collection and describing Daisy’s Kali. She portrays Damian as cool and clinical. (After making love with Daisy, he observes, “all those studs and things, in soft body tissue -- there’s a considerable possibility they’re carcinogenic.”) The ending is abrupt, startling, simple -- a reminder of the transformative mystery of birth.

Then there is “A Stone Woman,” a story as strange and wondrously beautiful as its protagonist. “You are a walking metamorphosis,” an admiring Icelandic stone carver tells Ines, who, in the months after her mother has died, has begun to turn into stone, beginning with the scar from a recent surgery. Before long, her body is made up of volcanic glass and semiprecious stones, with molten lava flowing through her veins. A necklace of opals sprouts above her collarbone -- “fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane, full of watery light,” and she walks with a new rolling pace, “marble joints in marble sockets.” She realizes that to doctors she would be “an object of horror and fascination to be shut away and experimented on.”

The Icelander, whom she meets in a graveyard where he repairs statues, recognizes that Ines is returning to the earth in a form suited to his homeland, a land of volcanoes, glaciers and trolls. So he takes her there. In voluptuous geologic language, Byatt creates a portrait of a woman searching for the place she belongs. In Thor’s Valley, which lies between three glaciers and two deep rivers, Ines encounters others like herself -- “huge dancers, forms that humped themselves out of earth and boulders, stamped and hurtled, beckoned with strong arms and snapping fingers.”

“Raw Material,” the slightest story of the five, is a sly take on the “whirling nastiness” of adult creative writing classes. The star pupil in this class is an 82-year-old “spinster” whose narratives on the archaic techniques of cleaning stoves and doing laundry cover up a life of horrific abuse.

The supernatural element in Byatt’s last story, “Pink Ribbon,” is the seductive fetch in red silk who appears at an elderly man’s door one night and stays for a glass of whiskey. She calls herself “Dido.” She knows all about his intimate life. She is the otherworldly essence left behind by his wife, a former intelligence specialist, who has wandered into the horrifying wasteland of Alzheimer’s disease. And she wants him to set her free.

These bewitching stories are immensely readable, fiercely intelligent and studded with astonishing refracting images. “Little Black Book of Stories” is a virtuoso performance by a master storyteller; Byatt spins pure gold from the darkest elements in our nature. *