In The Longest Pregnancy, winner of the 2005 Tartt First Fiction Award, Melissa Fraterrigo invites us into a new place: a forgotten country just a few miles off the interstate, a place where the residents can see their way out to the larger world and yet, at the same time, know deep down that they’ll never make it there. This is a debut collection, but Fraterrigo is clearly familiar with the geography of her narrative space, and in each of these stories she offers us fragments, pieces of the map to her territory, one that is equal parts longing and mystery-with a little bit of creepiness thrown into the mix.

In “The Attached Couple,” newlyweds wake up on the first morning of their honeymoon to find themselves, well, wedded, their bodes joined together by a four-inch wide “opaque bridge of skin connected [them] at their waists.” Icky, yes, but icky and resonant and lingering in the way a certain kind of bad dream can be. In “The Country of Women,” a townful of better halves decide, all at once, to pick up and move across city limits, leaving a few thousand husbands behind, scratching their heads, wondering, for the rest of their lives, what went wrong. Story after story introduces us to women on the verge-wives, daughters, sisters, magical women, impossible women trapped, literally, metaphorically, or both, by others, by themselves, by the past, by the future, by anything and everything; trapped in glass houses, their feet eaten off by sharks; trapped in small lives; trapped in jobs; trapped even in their own bodies. The world in which Fraterrigo’s women live is a sparsely populated one, quiet, barren of fictional furniture, other than the stray bit of pop culture or the jarringly specific detail reminding us that we are, despite the presence of giants and 400-year-old women, operating in the real world. These are fairy tales from the border region between magical realism and a kind of blue-collar minimalism. The result is a sense of desperation, a feeling of isolation, a palpable eeriness: This is mood as substance, as physical setting and constraint, as fate.

Although the title story and several of the other offerings tend towards the longish side, allowing Fraterrigo to demonstrate her sense of pacing and ability to accumulate, sentence by sentence, the tension and creeping terror pervading these stories, she is at her best in “Bejeweled,” the shortest piece in the collection. When all of the rest is distilled away, we are left with Devola, a woman who has discovered, of all things, a chair that seems to know, from the deep, dark crevices of its cushioned heart, the cause and cure for Devola’s insatiable desire:

. . . It was as if the ground was moving and shaking beneath her feet. The town of Brewster and the entire world for that matter was being made over, and in a moment, when the rattling in Devola’s chest stopped, she was certain everything would be different-reformed, new.

It is in this “moment” that Fraterrigo operates, inserting us into that small space between the noise of modernity and the dead quiet of a long-lost, never-existent fable world.