Mixing fantasy, horror, the gothic and the supernatural, the stories of Massachusetts-based Kelly Link play host to a menagerie of untrustworthy wizards, talking corpses, vampiric ghosts and undead babysitters. Against a backdrop of recognisable Americana, anything might happen, and usually does. The stories are at their best, however, when the bizarre is anchored by the prosaic or domestic.

In "Magic for Beginners", 15-year-old Jeremy Mars and his friends are obsessed with a mysterious television programme, The Library. No one knows who makes it, who the actors are, or when a new episode will be on. When the show's hero, Fox, makes contact, Jeremy sets off on an unlikely road trip with his mother, stopping at each library en route to Las Vegas to claim an inherited wedding chapel.

Against this is set the well-observed and melancholy estrangement of Jeremy's parents, giving weight and pathos to what might otherwise feel chronically quirky. Likewise, "The Faery Handbag", the story of a Scrabble-obsessed grandmother from Baldeziwurlekistan and her people-swallowing bag, is also a tender picture of grief, love and displacement.

The material is often morbid but the writing is always bright, wry, laced with sharp observation and sometimes startling images. In "The Surfer" the sky is "such a thick, wet blue you expected it to come off on the bus and the buildings". In "The Specialist's Hat", recently orphaned Samantha and Claire resent their new status: "They are used to being envied, because they are identical twins. They don't want to be pitiful." Adolescents are at the heart of many of the stories, and Link has an acute eye and ear for the pleasures, pains and confusions of growing up.

Pretty Monsters will not be to everyone's taste. The collection comes garlanded with praise from a host of big-name, mainly American authors such as Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon and Audrey Niffenegger  Link is little known in the UK  and publishers Canongate have taken a risk in hoping that the book will appeal as much to a general readership as to the so-called "young adult" market.

Despite the stories' obvious qualities, the carnival of weirdness can become wearying. Ultimately, they play to the experience and fertile imagination of the bookish, cultish teenager rather than those looking for the next Kafka or Borges.