RELIABLE LIGHT <i> by Meredith Steinbach (Rutgers University Press: $18.95; 160 pp.) </i>

Short stories can be bad, good or, in rare cases, magical. This collection of seven by Meredith Steinbach consists of five good ones and two that are better than good; they leave dents in the bumpers of the reader’s mind that defy simple hammering out.

Steinbach also is a novelist (“Zara” and “Here Lies the Water”), and her stories have a novelistic amplitude. They enfold periods of years, crowds of characters, generations of families, without obsessive concern that every scene be immediately relevant or that every unnecessary word be pruned. This is confident writing.

True, three of the longer stories are, perhaps, too novelistic. A young woman divines the truth about her enigmatic mother when she returns to the Midwest for her grandfather’s funeral. Another young woman is stunned by loved ones’ deaths and dispirited by the effort of living in a sodden, Seattle-like city where the sun never shines. Residents of an island in New England watch as a Vietnam veteran re-creates the kind of tragedy he has spent years trying to forget. The many virtues of these stories--a quirkiness, a tenderness, a solid sense of place--just don’t happen to include perfection.

But one of the shorter stories--about an immigrant woman trapped with her lover in a Chicago hotel fire-- is seamless; the fire is both real and a symbol of her oppression outside, and we are left uncertain that she will escape.

And then there are the magical ones:

“Soundings in Feet and Fathoms” is told by a black doctor who has moved from Harlem to a small New England town, only to be trailed by the bloodhounds of racism. Bigoted parents refuse to let him operate on a boy, who dies; the doctor is blamed, and his own son is tormented at school. Steinbach has found this man a voice, recognizably black and male but jarringly unorthodox and individual, that speaks to his son--and to us--with humanity and power.

“Actual Oil” is a comic fable about three women who own a farm. The youngest runs off with a con man with “electronic eyes” who calls himself Hermes, after the cunning, silver-tongued herald of the gods. Even after she returns home, the older women must protect her from his charms. “Where are you anyway?” she asks when he phones to announce that he has completed a two-day encounter workshop and been “actualized.” “I am here in myself, where I am always at home,” Hermes answers in perfect-pitch psychobabble. “Temporarily I’m in Nashville.” The pitch stays perfect; the story is quietly, steadily, grinningly funny--on the road of reading, another fine thing to run into.