The most satisfying short stories rely on sleight of hand. As a reader, one looks but does not see until, at the end, everything one thought true must be assessed in a new light. Salley Vickers has mastered this art to perfection and effortlessly – sometimes deviously – conjures surprises. It is more than a matter of form. One of the pleasures of reading her is in her calm generalisations that tend to startle: “Any potential tragedy has an element of excitement about it.” “Good marriages are not always based on mutual understanding.” “Of course, all sentimentalists are sadists.” There is no “of course” about any of it. But there is a link between these pronouncements: Vickers’s inclination is to set the cat among the pigeons.

In her introduction, she explains that the stories were inspired by real places and friends – the late Deborah Rogers (not Vickers’s literary agent but a “dear friend”) is the inspiration for the disruptively enjoyable “Rescue” in which death involves an unwelcome rewriting of history. Vickers shared a “forensic and sometimes fantastical view of human nature” with Rogers, and in the opening story, “The Churchyard”, extends her forensic eye to nature. The story was inspired by a cottage – renamed Quince cottage – near Stratford-upon-Avon. A woman, recently separated, considers the rural scene in pleasingly exact detail. She notices that male blackbirds have “yellow bills assertively forward”. She longs to spot a barn owl as she once did with her absent man. She envies a heron whose heart cannot be broken. She then refines this to: “Paltered with. Worse than broken.” Paltered (to trifle with, or equivocate), first cousin to faltered, is a word I now plan to adopt. Vickers’s vocabulary is choice though never pretentiously rarefied. And at Quince cottage, the woman then settles down to the television news: “The violence and prevailing gloom were palliatives to a savaged breast.” It is another shocker of a passing thought because it rings true.

There is always, in Vickers’s writing, an extending of the familiar. The atmosphere, to borrow from Louis MacNeice, is of a world “suddener than we fancy it” and “crazier and more of it than we think”. These are stories in which life is not predictable and the supernatural never far off (this would be the perfect collection to give a control freak as a hint). For even clairvoyants, as the title story makes plain, are not in control. Eli, the boy of the title, is outlawed by his uncanny gift and Vickers interested in what it means to see too much (might this be an occupational hazard for a psychoanalyst – her other career?).

She writes especially well about family dynamics. In “A Sad Tale” she takes Mamillius from The Winter’s Tale, the boy who dies, and sensitively reimagines his story without succumbing to faux Shakespearean touches. But it is on irritating older women that she is at her best. The mother in “Vacation” who accepts insults as if they were compliments is brilliantly realised – her unwillingness to complain at holidaying with her son and daughter-in-law in a damp Scottish cottage implies she sees herself as a superior, damp-proof mortal, occupying the high ground. Middle-aged Verity, in “Rescue”, is also cannily drawn – formidable yet vulnerable. Even the way she sits is annoying: “with her knees planted apart, as women do when they have given up hope of sex”. At every turn, it is a collection that acknowledges the power of storytelling and never more so than in the pricelessly entertaining “A Christmas Gift”, in which a recently divorced, fiftysomething woman invents an imaginary lover to escape Christmas with her children. Conjuring tricks don’t come better than this.

The Boy Who Could See Death is published by Viking (£14.99). Click here to order it for £11.99