Author of nine wonderful books, among them - Sleeping in Flame, A Child Across the Sky - some of the finest 'horror' novels ever written, Carroll's short fiction has often proved much more problematic. Taken in magazine-sized bites, single stories, they frequently appear over-hurried, developing similar themes to the novels, but forcing quart ideas into pint pots. It's still true of this book - the revelations of 'Uh-Oh City' and 'A Bear in the Mouth' still seem more hectoring, than organic - but seen as a disjointed, 19 chapter novel, The Panic Hand develops a thematic coherence worthy of the Carroll canon. Certainly familiar characters and events pop-up unexpectedly in these pages - the architect Harry Radcliffe, last seen building the Dog Museum in Austria; Venasque the genuinely magical hippie-mystic; Nightmare, the on-going Nightmare on Elm Street-esque movie franchise.

This is casual magic: Magic Realism on a budget, no less, in its motifs and conclusions, but altogether more prosaic, less self-important. In 'Uh-Oh City' (the longest by some distance) a man's past returns to visit through a meeting with God, but God of a wholly different order. In fact, God crops up a lot in here as He (She? It?) has more and more in the novels. Arguably as Carroll approaches the Big Idea, his grip has faltered more, and the best stuff is represented by those pieces that stray into more abstract, magical realms.

In the title work, a man meets a young girl who gains acceptance from strangers by conjuring physical adults. 'Friend's Best Man' and 'Postgraduate' stray into almost commonplace horror, albeit of a superior stripe. And some, notably 'The Fall Collection', 'A Quarter Past You', and the brutally melancholic 'Learning to Leave', are really not fantasies at all, but simply compelling, beautifully crafted, perspicacious little short stories. Less ornate than those triple-named South American cousins he may be, but Carroll turns phrases in here to make any self-respecting author toss away their gold-nibbed Cartier "Santos": "A life that had once been as interesting and rich as a good novel was turning into a railroad timetable" ('Uh-Oh City'); cancer is "a slow mauve wave" ('The Fall Collection'); skin "the colour of a white candle in a dark room" ('Friend's Best Man'); "tureens of tea, big and hot enough to steam open every envelope in the world" ('Florian').

Big themes in supermarkets and school-rooms, the marvellous out of the ordinary (the original definition of surrealism, of course) - The Panic Hand is really a book for Jonathan Carroll watchers who've devoured and wondered at the novels and will appreciate the rich detailing he scratches out of these vignettes. The causally interested are directed first to the man's other books; the converted will need no further recommendation.