The Ultimate Witch

This collection of witch stories runs the gamut form tedious to thought-provoking to haunting. The best stories deal with contemporary witchcraft and mystical experiences. In an amusing account of mischievous modern witches, Kathryn Ptacek presents two sisters-in-law who discover a common interest in spells as they conspire to silence an annoying relative. When Nancy Holder's protagonist initiates contact with a representative of the Church of Satan, and then two friends die in a horrific car crash minutes later, Holder calls into serious question the idea of innocent coincidence. S. P. Somtow merges the old with the new by setting the traditional tale of Hansel and Gretel in Hollywood. Deserted by their parents, the two children are taken in by a psychic reader. Overwhelmed in a new world of drugs and prostitution, they finally escape and leave the suspected witch to burn in a bake-shop oven. From bedtime fairy tales (with witches living on the moon) to complex adult themes (a transvestite prostitute sodomized by a horned man), Preiss ( Where's Lulu ) and Betancourt ( Rememory ) have gathered an odd but often entertaining range of storylines. (Oct.)