So normal and yet so unusual

“DARK Mondays,” Kage Baker’s new collection of short stories, defies easy classification. Best known for her work in the science-fiction genre, Baker has gained popularity for her “Company” series of books set amid cyborg biologists and time travel in the 24th century.

“Dark Mondays,” however, seems to fit squarely in today’s world, plumbing situations more likely to occur in reality than in the sci-fi realm.

At least at first glance. Once we’ve been lured into these stories and have come to appreciate their ostensible real-life boundaries, bizarre and at times outlandishly supernatural events break in and ultimately shape the outcomes.

The opening story, “The Two Old Women,” follows an elderly widow in a seafaring town who cooks an elaborate meal, toiling tirelessly to get it right.

“[S]he worked very hard, pounding spices in a mortar, chopping greens, simmering broth.... but she prepared nothing with seafood of any kind. And in no dish did she use salt.” Readers come to understand that she’s creating “a Soul Feast” to lure back her husband who’d drowned at sea decades earlier.

And it works. He appears, young and virile, ready to help around the house and to bed a youthful version of the widow. By laying down a line of Borax along the perimeter of the house’s yard to break “the spell of the sea,” the widow tries to keep her deceased beloved out of the salty grasp of her jealous rival.

“She can call him, she can beat herself white on the rocks, but she can’t climb up here,” the widow says of the sea. “He will be safe in my house, let her gale blow as hard as it will.” But there’s a catch, the widow’s sister warns her, “There will be a price to pay.”

These kinds of supernatural twists appear in all the stories, with some venturing considerably further into the paranormal. Yet at their heart, they are asking deep questions: What are we willing to do for love? How does the need for revenge shape a life? And how is it that faith -- along with its opposite -- can be stronger than just about anything else?

One of Baker’s most remarkable tales, “Monkey Day,” follows Patrick, a young boy who is having a crisis of faith over a classroom project. Having been told by his first-grade teacher (a formidable nonbeliever) that all holidays are made-up events, he meets with the local priest to wrestle with this possibility. Are Christmas and Easter simply inventions?

As part of a class project, Patrick had created “Monkey Day” for Feb. 12, Darwin’s birthday. His belief in this holiday is so strong that when his teacher refuses to let him celebrate it with the class, he becomes enraged. With the priest watching, the boy sets scores of vicious primates -- “like Curious George on crack” -- on his teacher. “Come on, monkeys!” Patrick calls until even King Kong appears. But the teacher cannot see any of this because she doesn’t believe.

“ ‘There are no monkeys,’ she said, raising her handful of keys. The little monkeys cowered back and then sprang up again, hooting, beating her car with bananas, and the baboons bit savagely at its tires.” Can such dogged unbelief inoculate against threatened violence? “[E]vents are only as real as we make them,” the priest observes.

Through such wild flights of fancy, Baker’s stories ask us repeatedly: How much leash will we allow our imaginations? What are we willing to believe?

At times, the supernatural developments in these tales seem over the top or simply unneeded. In “Portrait, With Flames,” the story’s narrator (a former friend to a bunch of vampires) takes photos of morbid things, summoning somehow -- it’s never made clear -- a demonic spirit bent on destruction.

In “Maid on the Shore,” a sprawling pirate novella, the main character’s love interest turns into a spectral blood-drinking creature bent on revenge. It makes one wonder how much more of the characters’ lives might have been revealed if the writer hadn’t relied on the escape hatch of the supernatural.

“Dark Mondays” is a blend, ultimately, of magic and realism. Sometimes the paranormal twists work effectively; at other times, less so. Still, Baker’s tales are intriguing enough to keep us hunting for answers to the all-too-human questions she raises.

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Bernadette Murphy is coauthor of “The Tao Gal’s Guide to Real Estate.”