Book Review: 'The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories'

With turns that are weirdly perplexing and pointedly symbolic, Slavin's stories are domestic dramas stippled with grotesqueries: A woman grows teeth all over her body then has an affair with her dentist; a mulish feuding couple steps around a bowl of spilled pudding on the kitchen floor for months; and a celebrity mom takes a lover who is literally falling apart (in the end, she notes, ''An eye floating in a glass of milk follows me around the kitchen''). These impish slices of suburban gothic, written by a former TV producer, are occasionally a bit formulaic. But more often they're marvelously metaphorical, describing macabre situations of both alienation and redemption. A-