The Sorcerer’s Apprentice TALES AND CONJURATIONS by Charles Johnson (Atheneum: $9.95; 169 pp.)

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a collection of short fiction by the author of “Oxherding Tale,” is a slim volume. But it has a depth and range of perspective that more than compensate for its brevity.

The writing of short stories is a delicate task in that the economy of form requires that words be used with precision, and such isn’t always easy to come by. In these wild yet darkly elegant stories, which also function as emblematic fables and cautionary tales, Charles Johnson exhibits such precision as he probes various aspects of the human condition.

His language is an invigorating interweaving of hieratic and demotic English and everything in between. His tales are peopled by characters who, by virtue of their all-too-human wit unwitting itself, for good or ill, tumble into surreal existential trick-bags; and whoever they were, their heretofore quotidian lives are never to be the same again.

Though these stories might strike terror in the heart, as in “The Education of Mingo” or the title story “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” gentleness, warmth and humor are by no means lacking. These elements are inextricably fused with the horror of descent into the yawning void, and the stories linger provocatively in the mind long after one has read them.

In one way or another all of the stories are concerned with language: its use and misuse, the power it has over us, and how that power shapes and defines, indeed conjures up that which we call reality. “The Education of Mingo” chronicles an elderly farmer’s misguided attempts to acculturate his newly purchased African slave. The plot turns explicitly on the issue of language and identity in a novel way. It is a brooding story of the word literally becoming flesh, and the Frankensteinian consequences which ensue.

“Alethia” recounts a bizarre interlude in the life of a black, middle-aged philosophy professor who reeks of the lamp. Of an afternoon, he is rudely distracted from the comforting philosophical abstractions flickering across the Platonic cave of his skull and dragged straight down into a phenomenological fun house inhabited by pimps, pushers, drag queens and dope fiends, where he finds a certain sodden redemption. His katabasis is occasioned by the machinations of one of his students, a street-smart sister who desperately needs a passing grade so she can do something more rewarding with her life than simply serve as an anonymous statistical increment in a Moynihan report.

She may not be getting good grades, but this student has learned her lessons well, as the professor soon discovers. She has her “Posterior Analytics” well covered and vamps him with a modal proposition he can’t refuse. But the professor is so engagingly square that he fails to grasp the import of her words until she addresses him in language he is more familiar with:

“ ‘If I don’t ace this course--are you listenin’?--I’m gonna have to tell your chairman . . . that you been houndin’ me for a trim.’

‘Me?’ I looked up. ‘Trim?’

‘Look’--from my desk she lifted a fountain pen--’I’ll give you an ostensive definition.’ Uncapping it, she slowly slid the pen back into the cap. ‘See?’

‘Lord,’ I thought. ‘O Lord.’ ”

In “Popper’s Disease,” an unassuming black physician, married to a Swedish woman who teaches piano, finds himself trapped inside a flying saucer with a dying alien creature. Dr. Popper is a Barney Hill sans Betty, for Mildred, his wife, is at home giving a piano lesson when this misadventure happens to him on his way to make a house call. Trapped inside the saucer, he is more curious than fearful. He wants to save the life of the alien being and tries to console it. He also wants to find a way out, but while exploring the flying saucer, thanks to advanced extraterrestrial technology, he learns to his dismay that at that very moment Mildred is providing instruction in carnal, as well as musical, knowledge to her student. It is a very funny story which hearkens back to the refreshingly unsophisticated pre-Spielberg outer space fantasies and constructs of the 1950s.

The title story, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” again directly addresses the power of the word to conjure up and thereby reify itself. This time, though, it is a fatal doubt in such power which leads the protagonist, along with his father, to a harrowing, Gnostic self-obliteration. However, because the character of the apprentice’s father is not sharply drawn, his presence diminishes the force of the story for me.

These minor disappointments aside, the stories collected here are well-told tales, riveting, thought-provoking and well worth reading.