Aimee Bender's latest short story collection is deliciously strange. Some of the stories in Willful Creatures are premised on strangeness from the start, placing recognizable emotions in unfamiliar situations: a boy born with keys for fingers, a couple who have pumpkins for heads, a tiny man kept in a cage. Others are concerned with the more quietly bizarre aspects of everyday things. Bender drops her readers right into these worlds from the first line, clearly relishing the fact that they will not know the rules of where they've been placed, even as they might think they do.

Bender builds each of her stories around one bizarre idea or image, and her characters are brought to life by spare, deliberate language. You can't help but feel invested in their oddities. Not every story here stays with you, but the ones that do hang on tight. Some of the tales are deceptively simple. At the beginning of "The Meeting," one of the nameless characters is resigned to being disappointed by a woman he has only just met. As his presumptions gradually wear away, Bender portrays human connection as both inevitable and impossible. Lines like "He let his hand trace each of her vertebrae and she did not say, 'That tickles, stop,' like he thought she might," lead to a heartbreaking conclusion after five flawless pages. The glamorous narrator of "Off"reprised from a story in Bender's first collectionfloats through a party with a funny, vaguely sinister goal in mind. We read anxiously as the key-fingered boy in "The Leading Man" tries to find the doors he's meant to unlock. "Jinx" captures the del icate moment when everything changes between two friends.

Bender seems particularly transfixed by mortality in these pages. Through stories like "Death Watch" and "Job's Job," we get the sense that Bender is looking for some kind of ultimate meaning, but the searching doesn't feel heavy-handed. Although the two characters featured in these stories are plainly dealing with life or death situations, the dilemmas that face the characters in her other stories feel no less immediate. The intimate complexities of relationships are treated with reverence, even as she exposes their secrets. The final story in the book reads like a prayer.

Not everything is perfect. "The Motherfucker" suffers for being less sly than the others, and "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers" is not particularly memorable. The pleasingly dark "Fruit and Words" and "Dearth," seem at times to be reaching for something they never quite get hold of. But even within these, there are lines that make you pause and consider. Each pause makes Willful Creatures a collection worthy of more than one read.