FICTION

WOMEN AND GHOSTS by Alison Lurie (Doubleday: $21; 179 pp.) Like many writers before her, and a little like a poet trying to write a villanelle as homage to the importance of form , Lurie has written a collection of ghost stories. But the voices of her haunted women (all suspiciously thirtysomething) are so deadpan, so matter-o-fact, and the objects and situations endowed with ghostly spirits are so everyday that the stories end up being funnier than they are scary; the malevolent spirits no worse than the mothers-in-law and the creepy husbands-to-be and the academics that populate these stories on the mortal side. In “Ilse’s House,” a young woman engaged to a real jerk is haunted by his ex-wife, a potato sack of a drunken housewife who inhabits the kitchen. In “The Highboy” (a very funny story), Buffy is done in by a top-heavy, bird-clawed piece of New England furniture (if it hadn’t been the Highboy, it would have been the Spode). But some are really over the top, like “Counting Sheep,” in which a young academic who is ambition-impaired becomes a sheep, or “Fat People,” in which a dieter is haunted by a legion of “angry fat grey people.” They are caricatures of our taste for horror, Edward Gorey in the 1990s, without the knife-edged humor that has made him timeless.