Margaret Atwood sticks the knife in

Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

Alfred Hitchcock, a connoisseur of the short story, compiled a volume called Stories That Scared Even Me, and some of the tales in Margaret Atwood’s new collection, Stone Mattress, would have had the Master of Suspense shuddering in his shoes.

Vengeful, glacial anti-heroines abound; their hunting grounds are modern institutions such as cruise ships and care homes and, in a satisfying inversion of gender stereotypes, there is even, packed deep inside a storage unit, behind crates of champagne and bouquets of bone-dry roses, a mummified groom. “He’s enclosed in several layers of clear plastic… The groom has a wavery look, as if he’s underwater. The eyes are shut, for which Sam is grateful. How was that done? Krazy glue? Scotch tape?”

Atwood’s tone is enjoyably laconic, puncturing the schlocky tendencies of her chosen genre. Where a lesser writer would turn gruesome, she extends compassion; where horror lurks, she allows laughter. Masterly work. But the book is uneven, and the first 100 pages feel like an engaging but abandoned novel rather than three interconnected short stories. Luckily, the remaining six tales are wonderfully tight modern fables, and Atwood twists the knife with devastatingly casual skill.

Atwood calls these stories “tales”, invoking “the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales”. Her most important book was, of course, a tale — the dystopian modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale — and the lead title from this collection, Stone Mattress, began life as a tale told to pass the long evenings on a cruise ship. Her partner Graeme Gibson contributed materially, she notes drily, “as he seemed to have a plan in his head detailing how a person might go about murdering another person on such a trip without getting caught”.

The star of Stone Mattress is Verna, a black widow who dispatches her ageing husbands with artery-clogging foods and excessive medication. “Then there was sex: the terminator, the coup de grâce.” Next she becomes a little more cave-woman in her choice of murder weapon, and the stone mattress in question is not only the metaphorical hard bed that the victim has made for himself but also a stromatolite, a fossilised cushion of layers of the Arctic’s life-giving blue-green algae, responsible for 60 per cent of the planet’s oxygen but also, in the wrong hands, a suitable tool for bludgeoning.

The last story, Torching the Dusties, has the power of a miniature Handmaid’s Tale, displaying Atwood’s profound vision of an institutionalised, dystopian future. It is set in a luxury care home, under siege from menacing protesters wearing baby masks. Angered by the mess the older generation has made of the planet, and the resources they continue to consume, the vigilantes blockade the gates. The government looks away. Atwood’s final gift is leaving the worst unsaid.

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