Blood

The brilliant, vividly drawn images in this marvelous collection will deliver a satisfying shock of recognition to American readers, and no doubt ensure acclaim for this young Scottish writer. A character's waist-length hair is cut for the first time in ``Into the Roots'' and we see that ``a long neck, very white from lack of sun, had grown up in the dark like a silent mushroom.'' In the title story, a tooth is pulled, ``the gum parting with a sound like uprooting potatoes.'' Still other stories evoke darkly stained, often disturbing, images of human nature: A young woman remembers cowering behind her mother's skirts at the spectre of Fearless, the eponymous bogeyman, who would ``clink and drag'' up the street ``like Marley's ghost.'' In ``later he would open his eyes,'' an elderly couple's suicide pact has the old man imagining their car as it plunges off an embankment ``ticking over like a child's cough. Ticking over and lurching as though it might stall.'' If it is the job of the serious writer to recreate experience and give it new life on the page, then Galloway ( The Trick Is to Keep on Breathing ) should be gainfully employed for many years to come. (Nov.)