SAINTS AND Strangers bears up writer Angela Carter as not only a vibrant defender of her gender's claims and qualities but as a flagrantly original voice.

Carter loves to recreate old stories. That is her hallmark, despite the fact that she is often marketed as a feminist. A previous collection of her short stories, The Bloody Chamber, includes Carter's elaborate versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots.

Vampires, werewolves and other monsters, the stuff of legends, fascinate her. That is because these creatures represent an already well-developed mythology. Carter's references to these symbols accomplish what fairy tales usually accomplish--a disturbance of the unconscious through manipulation of imagery with which readers already have strong associations.

The stories in Saints and Strangers--like the ones in The Bloody Chamber and her other collection, Fireworks--cannot really be considered short stories, either structurally or psychologically. They are vignettish in quality, always descriptive, poetically introspective, featuring lots of big words. Carter, like Jorge Luis Borges, whom she has claimed as her major influence, has an exhausting vocabulary--more unknown words per story than in most other collections of short fiction in English.

BUT CARTER'S fiction is far funnier than any fairy tale or erudite vignette. The first story in Saints and Strangers, "The Fall River Axe Murders," recreates some of the events and personalities involved in Lizzie Borden's murder of her parents. Since the events of the story are already preordained--as they are in fairy tales--Carter's weapons are atmosphere, humor and meticulous research:

Nobody could call the New England summer a lovable thing; the inhabitants of New England have never made friends with it. More than the heat, it is the humidity that makes it scarcely tolerable. The weather clings, like a low fever you cannot shake off. The Indians who first lived here had the sense to take off their buckskins as soon as things hotted up and sit, thereafter, up to their necks in ponds. This behavior is no longer permissible in the "City of Spindles."

A story like "Our Lady of the Massacre" shows why some people like to call Carter a feminist. The story traces the life of another Moll Flanders, but focuses on her career in the New World as an indentured servant, rather than on her bawdy past. Carter avoids the literal picaresque by making the protagonist ironically self-aware of the conventions of 18th century narrative: "...my name is no clue as to my person nor my life as to my nature." Stripped of a name, the voice could be that of any period picaresque character, Moll Flanders or--Tom Jones.

This hint at sexlessness is further developed in another piece. Featuring yet another unique style, "Overture and Incidental Music for a `Midsummer Night's Dream'" develops a name in Shakespeare's play into a character, the Herm. This creature is simultaneously the source of desire and puzzlement to all the denizens of the forest--from Puck, who is a hairy, horny little bugger in Carter's fantasy, to Oberon and Titania.

Carter has turned the little Indian boy who catalyzes the action in Shakespeare's play into a hermaphrodite. Everybody wants him. The Herm, however, is different: "What does the Herm want? The Herm wants to know what `want' means."

In each story Carter, like the Herm, seems to take on two natures, historian and psychologist, or antiquarian and storyteller, or feminist and philosopher. Although she might be called one or all of these things, in the end she defies any rubric. She tantalizes, she informs, she delights. She may occasionally mystify, but good writers do that too.