The long season of Halloween is inveterately bookish. September’s publishing glut accompanies a return to gothic colleges and midnight oil and advancing dusks. Each author returns with a new concoction, a new lesson, in many cases a new punishment. This week, T.C. Boyle delivers a new story collection, “Tooth and Claw” (Viking, 285 pages, $24.95), in which his abiding tastes in the uncanny are finally but only marginally beating out his tales of alcoholism.

Animals dominate humans throughout these tales. In “Dogology” people simply decide to become animals; in “The Kind Assassin” a radio DJ locks himself up in a cage, refuses to sleep, and becomes an animal. Mr. Boyle’s writerly wherewithal outdoes itself in the unlikely plot of the title story: Hapless man walks into bar. Man is challenged to game of dice. Man wins giant jungle cat. Beautiful bartender smitten with jungle cat takes up with hapless man. As always, Mr. Boyle proves that fiction is stranger than truth.

Mr. Boyle’s authorial license is distracting yet rewarding. The sleepless DJ experiences bleariness as “some sort of integument” that “seemed to have been interposed between me and the outside world.” The hapless jungle cat owner describes the bartender’s “plenary eyes.” Mr. Boyle’s eccentric vocabulary deforms his slacker heroes; he seems to toy with them.

In many ways he is one of the best living American writers. He appreciates the careless humor of smart people living in our more banal communities, and writes clearly and unphilosophically about interesting psychological cases. More so than similar writers like Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, he lays out a serious personal emotional agenda in which dissipation is treated as an old friend who must perhaps be betrayed.

But Mr. Boyle is not the ultra-versatile storyteller so many critics believe him to be. Stories from this collection take place in Argentina and on exotic islands; several meteorites make appearances. The range of zany settings, however, is as narrow as Mr. Boyle’s trademark costume: orange goatee, pirate earring or beret. These stories could only be written by a man who looks like that.

***

Patrick McGrath, whose novel “Asylum” appears as a motion picture this fall, has made a career of overtly gothic fiction. Perhaps because the uncanny is closely associated with the 19th century, Mr. McGrath’s writing often betrays shades of thick, purple romance. That weakness finds fertile ground in “Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now” (Bloomsbury, 256 pages, $16.95).

This collection of stories is the first fictional number in Bloomsbury’s usually interesting series titled “The Writer and the City.” Three stories portray New York’s reality as, in the words of one 19th-century businessman, “a lawless territory where ferocity, speed and cunning counted most: a state of nature.” This businessman has channeled the language of our own hubristic businessspeak, though for him the state of nature means murder and consequent insanity.

The first and least successful story takes place in the revolutionary New York so vividly and calmly brought to life in David McCullough’s “1776.” Mr. McGrath dubs 1777 “The Year of the Gibbet,” and writes of downtown New York as if its guardian spirits were apprehended as darkly as those in Washington Irving’s Dutch country:

Of Trinity Church all that remained were ruined walls. Smoking beams lay tumbled upon one another and in the churchyard the headstones were charred, many of them cracked and split or fallen over in pieces, leaving only a snagged fraction like the remnant of a rotted tooth.

The middle story recalls Louis Auchincloss’s sketches of society families, but Mr. McGrath’s only definite success is his final chapter, a tale of September 11:

I saw in the glare of the floodlights fretted sections of the tower thrusting up from mountainous piles of smoking rubble, skewed from the true like tombstones in the nearby graveyard of Trinity church.

The overwriting in these passages indicates a lack of proportionate human agency – “skewed from the true” is a state wrought not by man but by gravitational force. Mr. McGrath’s romance of New York, like so many ghost stories, supposes a state of nature in which a superhuman imagination has ultimate control over reality, as an author does over his story. The September 11 story is a relative success because it is told by a psychoanalyst, a narrator capable of the guarded implications with which Mr. McGrath wields his power.

Still, this story feels truncated: The psychoanalyst begins to believe in Manichaean good and evil after she visits Ground Zero, but the enormity of such a shift is neglected as the story shuts down – it might have made an interesting novel. As a collection, “Ghost Town” is slight; Mr. McGrath’s charming novel of last year, “Port Mungo,” also concerns New York, and is easier to recommend.