The spirits are with her

Seated on the terrace of her rented Manhattan penthouse, Amy Tan appears the very model of the modern mega-author. She's clad in a chic-but-artsy all-black outfit. She sips a trendy (albeit vile-looking) health drink. She's candid and engaging. Gone is that ''nervousness'' attributed to Tan by one newspaper interviewer, upon the publication of her 1991 novel The Kitchen God's Wife. And with good reason: Despite Tan's fears, Kitchenwas widely praised as a worthy successor to her 1989 smash, The Joy Luck Club. Seventeen flights up, literally and figuratively, Amy Tan is on top of the world.

Which is not to say that she doesn't have some concerns about the reception of her latest book, The Hundred Secret Senses. ''Before I finished, I thought, 'People will rake me over the coals.' And they might,'' she says calmly, stroking her Yorkie, Bubba Zo. ''This is like a coming out of the closet.''

How so? Well, let's put it this way: Tan had help writing her third novel — and it wasn't from her editor, her agent, or her husband, Lou. ''There are no words for it,'' she says with a sigh. ''If I say 'ghosts,' people will think I'm haunted. If I say 'guardian angels,' it sounds like I've bought into the angel franchise. 'Yin people' is the best I can say. These yin people told me, 'Write about us. Write about ghosts.' ''

Yin people have long been a presence in Tan's life. She claims to hear their footsteps in her San Francisco condo. Once, Tan says, they revealed to her the names of her murdered friend's killers, four days before the culprits were apprehended. (''I never told the police,'' she says. '' They would have thought I was crazy.'') So when yin people advised her to write about them in Secret, Tan listened: ''They are telling me this is important. To not write the story would be...rude.''

Tan's politesse was well rewarded. ''As I wrote [Secret], it was as though there were ghostwriters helping me,'' she reports. ''One time I needed to find a name for this village. I opened up the Chinese dictionary. The very first page I looked at, my eyes fall on this word Changmian. It meant ''long sleep,'' a euphemism for death, which, of course, was perfect for the novel.''

Secret, Tan's fans will be relieved to know, is not a complete departure from her beloved earthbound creations. Its main characters are still women, and its interconnected vignettes still spotlight the family, only now the vehicle is the supernatural. There's the contemporary story of Kwan, who arrives in San Francisco from China and proceeds to lavish unconditional love upon her estranged half sister Olivia (the narrator), who thinks Kwan is mad for talking to ghosts. There are the intricate tales Kwan tells about her past life in late-19th-century China. Then there's a plotline involving Olivia's husband's obsession with a lost love. Eventually, these disparate strands come together in a manner that may be hard for some to grasp.

''I'm anticipating that there will be readers and reviewers who won't like the ending,'' Tan says soberly. ''If you don't believe [in the supernatural] you'll wonder, Why did this happen?'' Still, she's wary of the opposite reaction as well. ''I've had nightmares,'' she says, only half jokingly, ''that soon I'm going to be invited to every psychic fair in the country.''