At the Edge of Waking

“She knows what to do with shadows,” Peter S. Beagle writes with perfect accuracy in his introduction to this moody, haunting collection from fantasist Phillips (The Burning Girl). “Gin” and “Country Mothers’ Sons” depict families with dangerous secrets: alcoholism and lycanthropy. The dehumanizing realities of war and its consequences form the foundations of “Brother of the Moon” and “Virgin of the Sands.” In “The Rescue,” a young woman is imprisoned in a mental hospital as a hostage to ensure her rebellious family’s cooperation. A mild-mannered historian is saddled with the role of protecting the world’s magic in “Proving the Rule.” The most haunting stories reveal the alien and strange beneath the normal: life forms under the Antarctic ice in “Cold Water Survival,” the troubled writer of “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” whose muse offers another reality beyond the unkind real world, and the murky, potentially dangerous line between imagination and illusion in “Castle Rock.” Phillips’s crisp, dense writing draws readers into intimate, seductive worlds of shadow and emotion. (Sept.)