Comfort

Freshly evoked settingsa deer track, a flight of herons, a dry riverbed where the scent of lemons lingersreflect and intensify the fears and imaginings of the characters in this first collection of 12 stories. The transference from describable to unspoken is remarkably deft, as in ""Doe Season,'' in which a little girl shoots a doe and dreams that she holds its heart in her hands. ``Magic'' tells of the weary interaction between a man's young daughter and his mistress, who leads the daughter out to the lawn in the middle of the night and, stupefyingly, proves that she can fly. An anthropologist in ``A Mexican Tale'' visits the local witch, said to have turned a man responsible for murder into a dog. ``Elias Schneebaum,'' a failed composer, leaves his friends and family, retreats to the country and builds himself a swan-boat on which he floats to the middle of his lake, where he drops the body of his little dog, killed in a thunderstorm, and sits suspended between the rain-streaked sky and the water, part of and apart from both. This is a magical collection, written with grace and alive with an awful fancy. (February 3)