Short or long, Byatt always writes good stories. ( )

Unas niñas se refugian en el bosque durante la guerra, donde tendrán una visión aterradora que las mantendrá unidas para siempre. Una mujer se convierte poco a poco en piedra y un escultor la reconoce como parte del mundo oculto de la mitología islandesa. Un hombre se encuentra con el fantasma de su propia esposa antes de que ésta muera... Cargadas de tensión dramática, las cinco fábulas de El libro negro de los cuentos concentran todo el poder evocador de las leyendas infantiles, el misterio del escenario gótico, las conmovedoras descripciones de los cuentos de hadas y constituyen una deslumbrante reflexión sobre el modo en que afrontamos nuestros miedos y deseos más ocultos.

Another one that does what it says on the tin: a collection of five fairly dark tales, where Byatt uses the extra freedom of short form to be a little bit more experimental and less tied to realism than in her novels.

"The Thing in the forest" brings a grisly fairy-tale motif into an otherwise realist story about two women who met as little girls evacuated from London during the war. The Thing is memorably horrific, but the two women's strategies for dealing with the memory of it are perhaps a bit too flip. "Body art" — originally written for a Wellcome Trust exhibition — is about a gynaecologist who rather unwisely lets a young artist loose in a collection of historic medical artefacts.

My favourite in the collection was "A stone woman", a kind of mineral counterpart to Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman: a woman metamorphoses into rock in a glorious riot of geological and mineralogical terminology and Icelandic scenery. "Raw material" is a sardonic look at the Creative Writing business: an evening-class teacher tries to persuade his students to move away from melodrama and writing-as-therapy. Naturally, he finds that the one student in his group who is not tone-deaf to language, who repeatedly produces modest little sketches of the greatest elegance and beauty, is the one with the most melodramatic life of all. The last piece, "The pink ribbon", brings together dementia, Teletubbies, the Aeneid and the London Blitz in ways that were touching but didn't quite convince me in the end: I think there was just a bit too much going on. ( )

The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants.

A collection of slightly stories which appear to announce in all-caps, IF I CARED MORE I WOULD PLAGIARIZE. Yet it doesn't. I am not sure about our own state either. Byatt is always will suited for the epic scale (As long as she avoids Babel) but the shorter pieces appear to stumble.

The Blitz features a few times here, as do geriatric concerns, obstetrics and gynecology. There's a fallen Creative Writing teacher and a woman becoming mineral--albeit with poetic panache. The arc is situated to inspire the broken logic of the nightmare but I feel Angela Carter has a better handle on such. There has been a theme in reviews regarding the characterization of a black book of stories. I offer no insights. ( )

These are good stories, masterly written, thoughtful and very moving. They are also somewhat contrived and lacklustre from time to time. The first story stands out. If I had had this knowledge beforehand, and the book in my hands in the bookshop, I'd have put it back on the shelf and look for "The Thing in the Forest" in the New Yorker Fiction archive.

Gentle reader! If you think that I should still read the popular work of A.S.Byatt which is, incidentally, in my possession, give me a buzz. Otherwise I might give it to the poor. ( )