DOGWALKER, stories by Arthur Bradford, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, August 2001, 144 pages, $20.

Arthur Bradford, originally from Maine but now living in Vermont, is an O. Henry Award-winning short story writer. He is a stylist in writing, possessed of hilarious wit and a prankish streak that produces stories that range from the weird to the innocent.

“Dogwalker” is a collection of 12 of his stories, which is due in bookstores this August. They are about society’s misfits, the hapless and the troubled ones, along with several mutants. There are three-legged dogs and former circus freaks.

The first of his stories – “Catface” – sets the stage for the collection. It’s a tale about a guy who needs a roommate to help pay the rent. The succession of men and women who become a roommate in a studio apartment are outrageous – Thurber, who is of “shifty appearance” and a thief; Cynthia, a hooker; Jimmy, an apprentice bookie who sets up a tent in the living room; Catface, whose face looks like a cat; Robyn, a girl friend of Jimmy’s who does hexes and such; and some mutant puppies.

Then there is the short story about “a quivering yellow slug about the size of a loaf of bread.” There’s a tale built around the acquisition of a mattress. And one about the narrator’s friends, real or imagined, like Bill McQuill who loses his legs when a train runs over him. Or how about Little Rodney, a three-legged dog who ends up in the belly of a python?

In “Chain Saw Apple,” Bradford poses the idea of his friend Robert holding an apple in his mouth while he carves his initials in the apple – with a chain saw.

In “Dogs,” the author conjures up a character who has been making love with his girlfriend’s dog, Ellouise. The dog becomes pregnant and delivers a batch of little puppies – and one tiny human, which he puts in a box and sets sail in the river.

Weird enough?

There’s “Roslyn’s Dog,” in which the narrator gets bitten by a dog and fur begins to grow on his leg where he was bitten. Eventually he becomes a dog while the dog becomes a girl.

What saves all of these weird stories is a witty dialogue and ingenious descriptions of the people who inhabit his bizarre world. There is no plotting in these stories. They are just events and people and what happens to them.