With their once-upon-a-time hermeticism and broad sampler of mutant children, the new stories strive for the dark whimsy of certain nursery rhymes or a Grimm fairy tale: A family of pumpkinheads welcomes a tragic ironhead baby; a boy is born with keylike fingers; a solitary woman involuntarily adopts a litter of potato children; a lonely bachelor purchases a miniature man whom he keeps in a cage. Lightly freckled with Gogol and goth, many an entry becomes subsumed by its own premise, be it a glib pun (the protagonist of "Motherfucker" explains, "I fuck mothers . . . [a]nd I do it well") or a setup to a gallows-humor joke (first line of first story: "Ten men go to ten doctors"), with occasional strange bursts of a Mametian logorrhea (opening to "The Meeting": "The woman he met. He met a woman. This woman was the woman he met"). An occasionally inspired palate cleanser, Willful Creatures is lightest on its feet when it resists sentimentalizing its freaks and geeks: Bender moves most gracefully among them when her eyes are dry.