A.S. Byatt is best-known for her Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession. Her wide-ranging works, including novels, short stories and essays, have established her as a dominant voice in British literature.

Her writing explores the paradoxical territories between reality and fantasy, story and storyteller, life and art, body and mind.

The five new tales in Little Black Book of Stories are full of such explorations. They are fairy tales with philosophical depth and postmodern twists.

They include: young evacuees during World War II who come across a monstrous creature in the forest and don't speak of it again until they return to the forest as adults; a young artist who creates a work of art from body parts stolen from a hospital collection; a grieving woman who gradually turns into stone and finds surprising liberation in her new form; a creative-writing teacher who gets more than he bargained for when he involves himself with a talented student in his class; and a man who encounters the spirit of his living wife, whose mental state has been deteriorated by Alzheimer's.

Amid the weighty metaphors and often-dark subject matter, Byatt displays masterful control of language.

Her style can be sparse and matter-of-fact, as in the descriptions in The Thing in the Forest: "The two little girls had not met before, and made friends on the train. They shared a square of chocolate, and took alternate bites at an apple. One gave the other the inside page of her Beano. Their names were Penny and Primrose."

Or it can veer into lavish celebrations of nature in A Stone Woman: "Time too was paradoxical in Iceland. The summer was a fleeting island of light and brightness in a shroud of thick vapours and freezing needles of ice in the air. But within the island of the summer the daylight was sempiternal, there was no nightfall, only the endless shifts in the color of the sky, trout-dappled, mackerel-shot, turquoise, sapphire, peridot, hot transparent red, and, as the autumn put out boisterous fingers, flowing with the gyrating and swooping veils of the aurora borealis."

Despite such skill, however, Byatt's authorial control can sometimes feel excessively deliberate, interfering with the evolution of the story.

In The Thing in the Forest, for example, the central metaphors are powerful but the story itself doesn't come to life. One can imagine writing an extensive essay analyzing the symbolism of the monster in the forest, childhood fears in the context of wartime, the shift into adulthood and attempts to deal with disturbing memories. In other words, the ideas are interesting but the story itself lacks momentum and falls flat.

Elsewhere in the collection, Byatt has greater success. Her writing is at its most engaging when she allows her characters to develop in their own right, rather than simply existing to represent ideas.

In Body Art, three characters - self-centered doctor Damian Becket, flighty young art student Daisy Whimple, and Martha Sharpin, an attractive thirtysomething arts coordinator at the hospital - get caught in a tangle of attraction, jealousy and ambition. Although it's a smoother read than The Thing in the Forest, Body Art is still heavy on the symbolism: Dr. Becket is outraged when Daisy steals medical artifacts - including body parts - from the hospital collection to create a shocking work of art, yet at the same time he thinks nothing of taking "possession" of her body, forcing her to go through with the pregnancy that resulted from their one-night fling.

But in this case, Byatt anchors her conceptual themes with down-to- earth dynamics among the three main characters, and a healthy dose of dry English irony.

Byatt has characterized the competing elements in her own life as the rational, skeptical, ordered realism that she thinks she "ought" to pursue and the impulsive energies of mythology and imagination that fuel her writing.

When she finds a balance between the two, she breathes life into her characters and transforms philosophical ideas into startlingly original and powerful fiction.

But when rationality and order override, her writing feels wooden, like a writing exercise executed with great skill and persistent cleverness, but lacking the essential guts and soul of a good story. Too often, this is the case in her latest offering.

Jessica Slater is technology editor at the Rocky Mountain News.