BLACK GLASS.<i> By Karen Joy Fowler</i> .<i> Henry Holt: 242 pp., $23</i>

James Thurber’s cartoons on the war between men and women, large dog inserted, are a cycle that elicits continual redrawing. Thurber drew it as a man, and no cartoonist as good has done it as a woman, though Cathy Guisewite does a fair job. The best women’s versions have come, rather, in the form of short stories. (We wait to hear from the dog.)

Karen Joy Fowler’s “Black Glass” is a variegated collection of short stories, shards from the battlefield. It evokes a realm of women in part destroyed, in part gone underground and once in a while faintly reconciled. Outbound communications are subject to censorship; all kinds of expedients are adopted to get messages through.

Fowler is the author of two remarkable novels, “Sarah Canary” and “The Sweetheart Season.” Both use historical settings, authentic but faintly wacky, to allow their female characters idiosyncratic flights unencumbered by the chores of present-day real gardens; her imaginary tigers are absolved from weeding and hoeing.

In some of the more extravagant pieces in “Black Glass,” the real settings have all but vanished, replaced by nightmarish, backlighted combat. In “Lily Red,” a woman leaves an inattentive husband to find herself in a small-town settlement where all the women are under the spell of a demon lover.

In another story, a woman whose lover abandoned her is consoled in a bar by an older woman who enchants her with the account of an alternate world where men have to behave. The older woman lures her into the restroom promising to show her a glimpse of that world; once there, she strips off her falsies and reveals herself a man.

Fowler is not at her best in these and several other semi-spooky stories. Among them is the rambunctious but indulgent title piece about a federal drug agent who incautiously rouses the ghost of Carrie Nation, only to have her wreak a trail of destruction up the East Coast.

The author’s gift is for a magic that haunts life, not one that replaces it. Thus, “Go Back” is an aching story about a girl whose peaceful family life in Indiana is undermined when her father turns out to be sleeping with a student. The girl tells the story as a series of games with a boy whose second sight allows him to foretell what will happen to her and improve it. Literal magic is indistinguishable from the numinous aura of childhood and loss.

Fowler’s best pieces portray a vision in which what is free in female nature is both tragic opposite and tragic continuum to what is not free. In a brief meditation, akin to a poem, a mother contemplates her love for her adolescent son, and his inevitable departure, through the legend of a 15-year-old youth in medieval Japan who led an ill-fated rebellion against the ruling lords.

There is a witty tale of a timid young woman, armed against courtship, giving way when, astonished, she realizes that her suitor finds her desperately desirable. Told in the form of a college lecture--”Comparative Romance I”--its conclusion announces: “Any romantic entanglement between a male and a female is in fact a triangle, and the third part is the female’s body. It is the hostage between them, the bridge or the barrier.”

The finest story, “The Travails,” imagines eight letters written over 15 years to Lemuel Gulliver by his wife. They set out the twin arcs of an archetypal marriage: those of the male who adventures and evades and the female who confronts, sustains and records. Fowler gives Mrs. Gulliver a voice that is itself a journey: not around the curve of the world but around the curve of time. The early letters are cheerful, funny, brimming with news about the children and faith in her husband.

The years go by; each Gulliver return is followed by a departure. By the third letter, Mrs. Gulliver is apologizing for their quarrels and the fact that he left before they could make them up. Shadowed but struggling for hope, she writes that there are rats in the house but she can hire a rat-catcher: “Money can buy Men for many but perhaps not all Purposes.”

The hope wanes. The rat-catcher is mentioned with odd familiarity. After another of Gulliver’s trips home, she writes of a baby “that arrived somewhat earlier than we anticipated.” A deep discouragement sets in: “Here we live in the Dailiness of each other; that Dailiness you have fled.”

Gradually the burden of pain shifts. Their daughter’s husband beats her and the children. Their son leaves to go to sea. Life threatens to overwhelm the family, and in that light, after marital despair, comes settling for what you can. “Let us embrace again,” she writes. “We will find a way to live together, you and I, your Children and Grandchildren. Stay with us as long as you will, a valued Guest. And then go. We have no Wish to hold you. We have become the People you would have us be, and you need never fear hurting us again.”

It is not resignation. It is looking at the lives of a man and a woman as if, like the world itself, they both turned and held together. “The Travails” is a story whose simplicity contrasts with the artifice of some of the others and whose magic is genuine.