BOOK REVIEW : Bizarre Tales of Obsession : WE SO SELDOM LOOK ON LOVE; <i> by Barbara Gowdy</i> ; HarperCollins; $20, 209 pages.

If truth-in-packaging laws applied to book titles, “so seldom” would be replaced by “never,” and the dust jacket would carry a warning that these audacious tales are not for the squeamish.

Because Barbara Gowdy’s arresting stories of devotion, affection and obsession explore varieties of love hitherto left virtually untouched by others, the effect is both astonishing and unnerving.

While her gifts are impressive, her choice of subject matter can be profoundly disconcerting, even to a public inured to aberration and toughened by daily exposure to the outrageous.

There are eight tales here, each extreme in its own way, some merely extending the usual limits of plausibility, others reaching far beyond the credible to the utterly fantastic.

In “Body and Soul,” the situation is entirely believable, lending the story a poignancy absent from the more outlandish experiments that follow. A lonely widow provides a foster home for severely damaged children: a precocious girl of 9 born blind and disfigured, as well as an older child who is both epileptic and severely retarded. When surgical miracles restore the sight and the appearance of the younger child so she can be placed in a permanent home, Aunt Bea accepts an armless girl in her stead.

The element of shock here comes less from the children’s afflictions or the selflessness of Aunt Bea in caring for them than from the black humor with which Gowdy treats the material.

Grave physical deformity abounds here: a girl with the lower half of a twin attached to her hips, a two-headed man, a doomed hydrocephalic. The first two submit to radical surgery, which plays a tremendous part in Gowdy’s work. There’s also a transsexual. We follow all of these characters up to the moment of their operations, though Gowdy prefers to leave us in doubt about the outcomes.

In the three stories in which the characters are physically unremarkable, they’re mentally disturbed.

The title story deals with necrophilia, described in graphic terms calculated to stun readers who may already be reeling from the impact of the others. Even Gowdy’s formidable talent cannot diffuse this material, which remains repugnant despite her strenuous efforts to humanize her characters by making them otherwise winsome and articulate. By insisting that we think of necrophilia as just another variety of love, the horrific effect is at first intensified and then undone. Though the author’s intention is clear, the mind boggles and finally rebels.

In “Ninety-Three Million Miles Away,” a bored and dilettantish housewife takes up painting, posing nude at her apartment window while a voyeur across the way watches, her behavior becoming increasingly blatant.

Obsessed with the voyeur, she stalks him, sends him binoculars and finally confronts him in person. He tells her he’s moving away. By this time, we’re ready to believe this man is Gowdy’s one normal character. Comparatively speaking, he is, except for the central figure in “Lizards.”

While “We So Seldom Look on Love” provides an extraordinary showcase for a daring writer, the view through this particular window both attracts and repels. The unbalanced collection is bound to leave the impression that aberration is Gowdy’s sole theme.

Though her characters cope with their various pathologies in ingenious ways, the disorders are so extreme that they subsume the human being struggling to emerge. Recalling the stories, we forget the individual people and remember only the horrendous disease.