BOOK REVIEW : O’Brien Stories Mark a Return to Her Ireland : LANTERN SLIDES <i> by Edna O’Brien</i> Farrar Straus Giroux $18.95, 224 pages

Raise a jar to Edna O’Brien herself, back among us from foreign parts; the lilting prose and arresting insights restored; the black mood of “The High Road” all but dispelled. Wandering through Southern lands never did much for the writing at all, for hers is a gift that thrives on the bleak and the chill, far from the cruel blaze of the sun.

Here she is at her best again, telling of people and places close to her heart, and only occasionally recalling how wretched it was to be away from Ireland. Of the dozen stories here, only “Storm” takes place abroad, in a rented villa on the Italian seashore, where the writer has gone with her son and his girlfriend. There, “she sees her age and her separateness much more painfully . . . than when at home, and she is lost without the props of work and friends.”

She’s so miserable that she vows to make her excuses and leave, but morning finds her roasting on the beach, gamely making the best of it. By night, the pent-up tensions explode; mother and son vying with each other to say the unsayable. The next day, the young lovers go sailing, leaving the narrator alone with her remorse. A violent storm arises from nowhere, and her unease turns to a panic that’s partly maternal and partly the terror of a sojourner in an alien place. When Mark and Penny return, safe and excited, she thinks fleetingly of confiding her fear, but the look in her son’s eyes begs her to dissemble. The pretense that she’s spent the day agreeably is an admission that they’ve both “looked into the vortex and drawn back, frightened of the primitive forces that lurk there.”

There are primitive forces in O’Brien’s Ireland too, but they’re well known to her, and she writes of them with an easy familiarity and sly humor. In “Oft in the Stilly night,” an entire Irish village sits for its portrait. Behind the gate of the most imposing house, an ex-nun all but seduces her sister’s husband, then quietly wastes away of a mysterious disease, followed in short order by her brother-in-law. Thereafter, the doubly bereaved widow becomes a recluse, fantasizing a great romance out of a dreary marriage. She’s not the most eccentric by a long straw.

In the same small hamlet, a wife scrubs floors in order to keep her husband in idleness, a leisure he uses to accost girls in the woods. A single woman invites Gypsy tinkers to camp in her bedrooms, turning the other way when they steal from the neighbors. There’s a former priest living here, defrocked when his eye for the ladies could no longer be appeased by mere gazing, his failing charitably put down to insanity in the family.

“Brother” deals with forces so primitive they don’t bear mentioning, though O’Brien is more than up to the challenge. She goes straight into the mind of a woman who vows to murder her brother’s bride. Unfazed by the idea of prison, Maisie envisions the day when she’ll be released, and her brother will “be so morose from being all alone, he’ll welcome me back with open arms . . . the things I did for him,” but let O’Brien tell you that, the graphic words of the would-be killer.

The central character in “Dramas” is the village grocer, who not only enhances the tables of the townspeople with delicacies seldom seen beyond Dublin, but enriches their lives with talk of his favorite plays. He’s undone when his dream of a visit from a well-known actor comes true with a vengeance, and undone too is the narrator, who admired him with a stage-struck child’s devotion.

The voice in “Epitaph” is the lovelorn narrator of the author’s recent novels, heartbroken in the exotic place she went for a respite from her affair with a married man.

“There were boats in the harbor, boats festooned with fairy lights; there were dawns, blistering heat, golden evenings, a medley of stars,” but it was there, on that Greek island, that the writer realizes that the long romance is over.

Back in London, when the man she loves visits her, he’s “like those rich city cousins who come to the country one day a year and ask the locals so-called solicitous questions but are already tapping their watches to make sure not to miss the last train”--as piercingly accurate a description of the moment love dies as you’re likely to read.

There you have essential O’Brien; completely Irish, absolutely universal, the wit and the anguish in exquisite equilibrium.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “The Home Girls” by Olga Masters.