This second collection of short stories by Kelly Link, author of Stranger Things Happen, is hauntingly good and insistently memorable. A group of villagers live in a ‘faery’ handbag, a family’s possessions become possessed, and a boy possibly talks to a probably dead television character through a telephone in a booth he’s inherited in Nevada. Short stories are a tricky genre, most people read a story in passing and then forget it right away, but Kelly Link’s stories in Magic For Beginners are long on imaginative drive and tend to lodge right between the solar plexus and the funny bone where you can’t help but remember them.

Link’s voice is wry and understated, which creates balance for the magical and the out-of-left-field-ness of her vision. You believe her in the story “The Faery Handbag” when she tells you “Before the raiding party arrived, the village packed up all of their belongings and moved into the handbag,” and then you believe her again when she extracts a promise from you that you won’t believe a word of what she says. Link is interested in idiosyncrasies of thought; she mixes beautifully strange tales of the inner life with the otherworldly visitations of villagers and rabbits and giant science fiction spiders. Out of life’s ordinary messes – death or marital tension – she creates a sort of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets This American Life and in the telling also makes you feel as if you are listening to myths you somehow missed growing up.

The stories are littered with real kickers: In “Stone Animals,” which appears in this year’s Best American Short Stories, a woman finds herself living in a haunted house in the country while her husband commutes to work in the city. She finds a “gas mask in a box of wineglasses, and also six recent issues of The New Yorker, which she still might get a chance to read someday. She put the gas mask under the sink and The New Yorkers in the sink. Why not? It was her sink. She could put anything she wanted into it. She took the magazines out again and put them into the refrigerator, just for fun.” In a later story, the titular tale, a teenage boy visiting Las Vegas with his mother observes, “People are walking up and down the sidewalks. Some of them look normal. Others look like they just escaped from a fancy-dress ball at a lunatic asylum. Jeremy hopes they’ve just won lots of money and that’s why they look so startled, so strange. Or maybe they’re all vampires.” The descriptions are delightful, not in the least because they pull up and pin down passing thoughts and bring fanciful notions front and center, but because they make you feel less alone in your own strange little life with your own odd passing thoughts.

Kelly Link’s story collection is alive and kicking. At once wonderfully loopy and tangential, she comes full circle like a sharp rap at the door to make a point. And you won’t soon forget her visit.