Win a Few, Lose a Few : THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS <i> By A. M. Homes (W.W. Norton: $17.95; 173 pp.) </i> : LITTLE NIGHTMARES, LITTLE DREAMS <i> By Rachel Simon (Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour Lawrence: $18.95; 212 pp.) </i>

A teen-age boy is out on a date with his sister’s Barbie doll. Barbie is drinking a Diet Coke and complaining about Ken--”He’s always there waiting, and I’m like, Ken we’re friends, okay, that’s it”--in a voice that is “a cross between the squeal when you let the air out of a balloon and a smoke alarm with weak batteries.” Before returning Barbie to his sister’s bureau top, the boy cannot resist putting the doll’s entire head in his mouth, leaving teeth marks around her neck. Barbie’s incensed reaction to this “typically male” behavior? “You’re all the same. You’re all Jack Nicholson.”

A. M. Homes (the A is for Amy) establishes and adheres to her own logic in “A Real Doll,” one of the wonderfully skewed stories in her first collection, “The Safety of Objects” (she also is the author of an extremely appealing novel, “Jack”).

Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting the details right, as when the boy offers Barbie “a piece of a piece of gum.”

Both Homes and Rachel Simon, in her first collection, “Little Nightmares, Little Dreams,” offer similarly preposterous scenarios in several of their stories. With Homes, one is happy to go along for the ride; however, with Simon, you’ll want to think twice before climbing aboard.

Homes opens her collection with “Adult Alone.” A Westchester couple, Elaine and Paul, pack the kids off to Grandma and give themselves over to 10 days of dissipation. After the porno video and overeating, after a run-in with the police, Nintendo on the home screen and spilled wine in bed, they get the idea from a television special on crack.

“When the report is over, they are quiet for a minute, uncomfortable, and then he turns to her and says, ‘I think I can get some?’ ”

Elaine returns home from errands the next day to find six vials of crack on the dining room table. “Is that a lot or a little?” she asks before they have at it.

This suburban escapade is followed by “Looking for Johnny.” There is not a misstep in this difficult story of the kidnaping of a 9-year-old boy. Its effect depends, once again, on Homes’ getting the queasy details exactly right. The kidnaper, Randy, insists on calling young Erol “Johnny.” The man doses the boy with medicine to make him sleep; when it makes Erol/Johnny sick, Randy suggests, “A Fig Newton might work. I’m not a cookie person, but Fig Newtons aren’t really cookies, they’re more of a medical food, you know?”

Randy arranges real boy activities for the two of them--a fishing trip, splitting wood, poker--he even tries to teach “Johnny” to drive. The brutality in this story is not the obvious kind. Homes instead introduces the more interesting case of a kidnaper who is disappointed in his captive. “A kid like you should have more to say,” Randy says. “You should be nonstop, filled with ideas. . . . It’s like you’re not all there.”

This criticism taps into facts of the boy’s family life in a way that lets the reader see the blueprint for a lifetime’s damage.

“The Bullet Catcher” echoes Frederick Barthelme, with Suburban Man struck dumb and desperate, made weak by the lusty, empowered teens in a shopping mall. Spying on a trio of babes with big hair, Frank overhears one of the girls ask her overdeveloped friend how she can be hungry, having just eaten a cheeseburger and fries. “Her breasts were growing, Frank thought, they needed food.”

A radio station-sponsored contest draws Frank deep into the life of the mall. A new Jeep on display there will go to the person who can keep his or her hands on it the longest. Homes deftly moves Frank from peripheral figure to the center of attention as his vicarious involvement turns hysterical.

Not all of Homes’ notions pan out. “Yours Truly” and “The I of It” begin in similar fashion: “I’m hiding in the linen closet writing letters to myself” and “I am sitting naked on a kitchen chair staring at it.” These stories are little more than exercises in solipsism, but they are eclipsed by her successes that evidence a fully engaged imagination at work--and at play. She is sharp, funny and playful--without getting careless.

Homes and Simon are recent graduates of college writing programs. One of the first pieces of instruction a student of writing hears is: “Don’t tell--show.” The variation I heard was: “Don’t claim--prove.” It is a lesson Simon seems not to have learned, judging by the stories in “Little Nightmares, Little Dreams.”

There are stories here with sexual themes that try for titillation instead of revelation. They are all claiming, and make the author sound like a Mary Gaitskill (“Bad Behavior”) wanna-be. “Magnet Hill” is the story that does succeed with a naughty girl narrator. Here is the way she describes herself and a co-worker at Burger King: “I’m eighteen and tall and my tits are big and stand up without a bra, and guys can’t help seeing me. I’m a neon sign on a back country road. Jeannine respects that, it’s how she wants to be.” A double date on Magnet Hill puts her in her place.

In “Breath of This Night,” a mother urges her three daughters to exhale into jars, which she seals, to savor when she is old. It’s a nice image, unless you’re aware that Marsha Norman one-upped it in her one-act play, “The Laundromat,” in which a widow tells another woman that when she cleaned out a closet and found a beach ball, she realized it was filled with her dead husband’s breath.

The title story, about an old married couple who strive for greater intimacy by trying to dream together, is disappointingly sentimental and all spelled out. “The Greatest Mystery of Them All” opens with a Jewish girl going to heaven after her mother has shot her to death (the daughter tried to keep her mother from going on a drug run). In heaven, it turns out you get to look any way you want, so the girl becomes “a slender blonde with a little button nose and perfect white teeth.” Then she meets God. In her neighborhood of heaven, God is a kosher butcher. It is all too silly.

The bottom line is: These are not grown-up stories. Simon is a younger writer, in her 20s, but so was Ethan Canin when he wrote the very grown-up stories of “Emperor of the Air.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” is a fair demand for a reader to make on a writer. I’m still waiting.