Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt

Say you’d like to be whirled away by Victorian tales of troubling beauty, blending science and faith with a piquantly rancid edge of depravity. Here are the novellas for you—the first traces the seemingly charmed, semi-somnolent life of an explorer drawn into the bosom of a British family some time in the late 19th century, only to realize he has been snared. Fable-like, ants and an overlooked woman are the key to his escape. In the second, a pair of women, one possibly with true psychic gifts, sit at the center of a circle seeking communion with the dead. Mesmeric, rich, and strange.