Comparative Anatomy: The Best of Stephen Gallagher

"Magic always stops at midnight," says the doomed narrator in the title story of Stephen Gallagher's career-spanning collection, Comparative Anatomy, but while that may be true, the reader will find no end to the magic in these thirty astonishing tales by one of Britain's most distinguished writers.

From the inimitable postwar melancholy of a forlorn ghost bound to the house in which it died in "Twisted Hazel," and a common man's misguided attempt to temper grief in "Shepherds' Business," to...