A new book by Steven Millhauser means a substantial treat. He may criticize the pleasures of escapism in his fiction, but he provides them himself. Like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, he takes the institutions of fun — parks, pleasure domes, fun houses — as his subject matter. But unlike these writers, Mr. Millhauser never quite makes a joke of it. Unlike so many of the postmodern American writers he superficially resembles, he is not especially interested in sex, or even in wit. Instead, he tries to capture the very feeling of childhood innocence that can make a dark penny arcade so radically interesting in the first place. He describes just what it feels like to enter these magic kingdoms; he tries to represent the thrill of immersion, and if he can do so metafictionally — putting a box within a box and producing a Borgesian “Aha!” — so much the better.

Mr. Millhauser’s most successful book, “Martin Dressler”(1996), combined his love of imagined worlds with a keen taste for cultural history: It brought turn-of-the-century New York brilliantly to life. Mr. Millhauser’s taste for fusty Victorian details — and his love of anachronism overall, for outdated science and forgotten, sweaty-browed geniuses — anticipated cultural products such as Wes Anderson movies and the literary journal McSweeney’s, to which he contributes. And it could be said that what these phenomena lack is the same thing Mr. Millhauser’s work lacks — a sense of genuine danger, of threat.

“Dangerous Laughter” (Knopf, 256 pages, $24), then, Mr. Millhauser’s new collection, would seem to stake out new ground for his fiction. But the title story imagines laughter that is literally dangerous — a teen cult of extreme, hour-long laughter grips a suburban community for one summer — and thereby brings the idea of danger back to where it always lies for Mr. Millhauser, to the point where fantasy takes control. That moment of release, and a subsequent taste for repetition and intensification, guides almost all of his plots. It is true that one character, a previously quiet girl who becomes queen of the uninhibited laugh, actually dies. But the sense of danger upon which the story balances is that of midsummer restlessness, of inhibition’s intermittencies — of initiation. The danger is, in a word, sweet.

Many of the stories in “Dangerous Laughter” are excellent. “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” stands out: It reactivates vivid memories of childhood cartoons and, except for the repeated motif of safe danger, is thematically unrelated to the rest of the collection. This is nothing that hasn’t been done before, bringing a cartoon staple to life, injecting him with an unusual amount of interiority (the mouse resents the fact that he is never allowed to make a mistake; the obsessed cat envies the mouse’s nonchalance). But Mr. Millhauser’s prose races. He wants to prove that verbal arts can match the visual, and to outdo Hanna-Barbera:

The cat and the mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s much too late: the big door looms. The mouse crashes through, leaving a mouse-shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-shaped hole with a larger, cat-shaped hole.

Mr. Millhauser doesn’t invent his details; he remembers them, and always impressively so. In “Cat ‘N’ Mouse,” he revives tired visual puns by putting them into words, but the real drama in the story is the writer’s obvious fascination with — and memory for — these old cartoons.

In “Martin Dressler,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, Mr. Millhauser was remembering details not from a time he had experienced, but out of what was obviously a long passion for the period. A few of the stories here, including the Edison-inspired “Wizard of West Orange,” recall that book’s flavor, capturing a time when the race to invention was wildly fruitful but often quixotic. Almost all of the stories, however, reproduce the basic arc of “Martin Dressler”: A character or a community gets onto something good, but they overdo it and ruin themselves.

Only the best of these stories manage to make that arc hurt, in the short amount of space available. “In the Reign of Harad IV” deserves special mention: It concerns a man of ambition who is not a master builder, but an artist. He has been working for years on a miniature version of King Harad’s palace, but his taste for the nearly invisible leads him to create objects so deliciously tiny that they actually are invisible — and thus his fame and fortune ends. “As he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had traveled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.”

blytal@nysun.com