T.C. Boyle has been publishing fiction since 1979. In the course of the past 25 years, he has enjoyed enthusiastic reviews, won prestigious prizes and developed a substantial fan base.

He's so well known to the sophisticated literary set that he has been the subject of several New Yorker cartoons (his distinctive middle name - Coraghessan - is a factor here). And he has managed to build this reputation without sacrificing his image as a trickster, an iconoclastic wild man.

Devoted fans are likely to have already read the stories in this, his newest collection, Tooth and Claw, since all 14 have been published previously in all the old familiar places, the New Yorker, Harpers etc.

But for those who are unfamiliar with his work or who have wandered into one of his more unapproachable novels and quickly wandered back out again, this collection is a perfect place to start. Although his novels have garnered their share of prizes, for me, the short story is an ideal form for his remarkable talents.

Boyle has a seemingly limitless gift for the outrageous, sometimes grotesque, often incredible situation and for compelling the reader to buy into it, at least for a time. We accept the premise and go along for the ride.

In one of these stories, "Dogology," we are introduced to a young woman studying to be a primatologist whose graduate committee has rejected her thesis on the basis (she believes) that her subject of study, the dog, was too common, too pedestrian. Rejecting them in return, she decides to continue to study dogs and to study them even more closely.

"What she was doing, or attempting to do," writes Boyle, "was nothing short of reordering her senses so that she could think like a dog and interpret the whole world - not just the human world - as dogs did."

She moves at night with packs of dogs, getting down on all fours, sniffing at everything, going wherever they go and eating what they eat. She's with them when they corner and kill an opossum. She names them according to their personalities. She's the canine Jane Goodall, stepped way over the line.

In the title story, the narrator, a young man, wins a serval, a large and dangerous wild cat from Africa, in a bar bet. Boyle brings this animal, as he did the dogs in "Dogology," alive through highly sensual descriptions.

The narrator first notices the animal as "something in the cage, the apprehension of it as sharp and sudden as the smell it brought with it, something wild and alien and very definitely out of the ordinary." Its owner describes it as "thirty-five pounds of muscle and quicker than a snake."

Animals play a role in many of these stories, and Boyle's interest in them seems intertwined with a proposition that man has not risen so far above them as he would like to believe. His first collection of stories was entitled Descent of Man, and he introduces this collection with a quotation from Darwin's work of the same name:

"The Simidae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and the Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and glory of the universe, proceeded."

Boyle casts a jaundiced eye on "the wonder and glory." It comes as no surprise, then, that most of the central characters and narrators of these stories are minimally evolved - losers or, at best, underachievers on the verge of becoming losers. They're soaked in alcohol and fueled by drugs. Eventually, they're left behind.

In one story, "The Swift Passage of Animals," the "hero" is driving a new girlfriend to a winter lodge for a romantic tryst. He's fascinated by her, and she's fascinated by animals, particularly extinct animals. A blizzard comes up en route which he should have anticipated but didn't. His subsequent actions serve to gradually douse the romantic fires until eventually, frustrated and angry, she says to him, "You know what killed off the glyptodont?. . . Stupidity."

Boyle's world is Darwinian, a universe indifferent to men and animals alike. In "Chicxulub," a family's personal anxiety and suffering is juxtaposed against predictions of the planet's destruction by meteors. In "Blinded by the Light," a latter-day prophet howls in the wilderness about global warming and holes in the atmosphere.

All of this seems pretty depressing, but as readers of Boyle's earlier fictions know, his world is a darkly comic and even, from time to time, compassionate one.

As in all collections of short stories, some pieces are better than others. Many of these stories are dazzling, some just quite good. But each one is worth the time it takes to read it.

Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins.