Exploring the Various Shades of Gray : GREY AREA by Will Self; Atlantic Monthly Press $22,287 pages

“Grey Area.” Now, here’s a phrase to conjure with. Most commonly, it means an area of doubt, an ambiguity. In these nine stories by one of England’s most unnervingly funny writers, Will Self, it means a number of other things as well.

In the title story, it refers to the sterile, plastic, bureaucratic atmosphere in which a young woman works for a nameless company; later, to the “condition of stasis” that settles over society, like the entropy in Thomas Pynchon’s famous tale. For six weeks, nothing happens. The weather remains the same, “limpid and void”; the days neither lengthen nor shorten. The minutes she takes of departmental meetings vary not a comma. Her periods stop.

In “Chest,” it refers to a dense, toxic fog that settles over the English countryside, blighting the vegetation and afflicting animals and humans with bronchial ailments and cancer. Simon Dykes, an artist, struggles to keep his family alive while the snobberies of village society go on as before: His rich neighbors, using scuba gear and radar, hunt sickly, transmitter-equipped pheasants “on instrumentation,” spraying Dykes’ windows with wayward shot.

In “Inclusion,” Dykes, who has died in “Chest,” is resurrected--how’s that for ambiguity?--and made a depressive. Grayness here refers to his suicidal funk (though a few tendrils of that fog creep in). He is treated illegally with an experimental drug, Inclusion, that promises “positive engagement” with life and works only too well. To be interested in everything, it turns out, is hardly better than to be interested in zilch.

Dykes soon finds himself “cataloging my antiquarian library; electroplating my model trains; completing the construction of my combination sousaphone-and-samovar; and launching my collection of designer clothing made entirely from carpet off-cuts.”

In “Incubus,” the gray area is the question of free will. A pudgy little philosopher who seemingly has refined himself away from bodily concerns gets drunk, plays Wagner on the stereo and, “on autopilot,” makes “demonic, intense” love to a graduate assistant in a room in his house where a 17th century Manichean sect, the Grunters, held their orgies. Next morning, he doesn’t remember.

Self’s tactic is to take a familiar situation or idea and push it to wild, satiric lengths--and sometimes beyond satire, so that the grin it provokes is hardly distinguishable from a rictus of agony.

In “Between the Conceits,” the narrator claims that he and seven others are the only individuals in London who count. This is obviously a sendup of English class distinctions and of the narrator’s megalomania--but so detailed is his account of how he pulls the strings that control the lives of hundreds of thousands of “my people” that, in the end, we wonder: Suppose he’s right?

The photo of Self on the jacket of “Grey Area” is unusually evocative. He perches hugging himself like a gargoyle, with Monty Pythonesque zaniness, but his beady-eyed expression insists he isn’t joking.

The final story, “The End of the Relationship,” is one of his funniest and cruelest. A young woman described as an “emotional Typhoid Mary” breaks up with her boyfriend and somehow precipitates the breakup of every couple she turns to for sympathy, all along the social scale from therapist to cabby. She wins our sympathy, but the humor of the story depends on our withholding it.

This puts enough strain on us to pop half our synapses; it reminds us that Self’s real subject, and target, is that convoluted 6-inch gray area between our ears.