Murder in the Morbid Mind : BLOOD AND WATER AND OTHER TALES <i> by Patrick McGrath (Simon & Schuster/Poseidon Press: $15.95; 184 pp.) </i>

Some of these tales are silly, some are gross and some are actually pretty good. In this slim volume of 13 stories, we’ve got a little of everything: a haunted Southern mansion, complete with bayou and Spanish moss; a crawling hand, vampires of a sort and various and sundry other creepies, fringe dwellers and eccentrics. They’re all off-kilter and tend toward the macabre and horrific. Patrick McGrath has a facility for setting his scenes (anywhere from India, to English moors, to New York City) and for flavorful description, but a lot of the stories tend to the banal, structurally, punctuated with a bizarre ending.

What makes horror into great horror is what’s implied, what’s hinted at and the mood the story sets. Subtlety goes a long way, and McGrath’s handling of “Lush Triumphant” is the most deft. But in the main, McGrath is uneven. The stories don’t build into satisfying wholes. In “Marmilion,” the ending felt completely tacked on. The last section of the story waters down the impact of an otherwise nicely gothic tale of folks gone too ripe in the brains because of isolation and boredom. It’s the same with “The Arnold Crombeck Story”--about an English gentleman murderer of women, who during his last days before hanging is interviewed by a lady journalist. It’s a good story, except for the last paragraph, which again felt tacked on, as if McGrath couldn’t leave any loose end loose. Even the ending of the opening story, “The Angel,” is a bit too much, even for a decadent angel.

Perhaps another problem is that there are no sympathetic victims or even perpetrators. When all is said and done, it’s no great loss or crime that these incidents have occurred.

McGrath definitely has the right imagination. Now if he just didn’t let it run away so. . . .