There’s an especially lovely story of that last, skeptical kind in Cristina Fernández Cubas’s remarkable collection, NONA’S ROOM (Peter Owen, paper, $14.95), which is the first of this Spanish writer’s books to appear in English. The narrator of “Interior With Figure,” a version of Fernández Cubas herself, visits a Madrid gallery and becomes fascinated with a 19th-century painting, half-convincing herself that a small, mysterious, fearful figure in the picture is somehow linked to the fate of a real little girl, on a class trip, who shares her fascination. “She knows they want to kill her,” the girl announces, and when asked “Who wants to kill her?” replies, “Her parents.” And after a near accident as the student group crosses the street outside the gallery, the writer starts to wonder whether the real girl might actually be in the sort of danger she attributed to the figure in the painting. Fernández Cubas agonizes, debates with herself the wisdom of going to the police, questions her own writerly propensity for imagining things. In the end, she decides to surrender to her imagination in the way that writers do — accepting both its limits and its power, and putting pen to paper anyway.

The title story of “Nona’s Room” is slightly reminiscent of a couple of Matheson’s twisty, deranging first-person narratives, “Born of Man and Woman” and “Dress of White Silk,” and one of her tales (“Chatting to Old Ladies”) has a kind of monster in it, but Fernández Cubas is, I think, more an artist of the uncanny than of horror per se. In these six elegant stories she’s most interested in the ambiguities and periodic disturbances that plague the imagination, and reports on them with the appropriate sense of awe, even of dread. In the territory of the imagination, the threat of madness is never too far away, a dark cloud hovering.

The clouds that roll through the four novellas in Joe Hill’s STRANGE WEATHER (Morrow, $27.99) are pretty consistently ominous, too, though they mean something different in every story. In “Snapshot,” the fearsome thunderstorm unleashed at the climax seems to stand for the washing away of memories from an Alzheimer’s-afflicted mind. In “Loaded,” the cloud is a thick haze of smoke from a raging forest fire approaching a Florida town — where a psychopathic mall security cop on a killing spree is generating some deadly smoke of his own. “Aloft” (the book’s weakest story) finds its hero, a terrified first-time skydiver, marooned atop a fluffy-looking but curiously solid white cloud. And in the apocalyptic “Rain,” the clouds burst with lethal precipitation, dagger-like crystals that riddle anyone unlucky enough to get caught in the downpour. Hill’s fiction is squarely in the pulp-horror tradition that Matheson helped establish — yarns about extraordinary things happening to ordinary folks — and, unsurprisingly, because he is Stephen King’s son, it’s King’s relentless, hard-charging Matheson that his work most closely resembles. His afterburners have afterburners. All his writing has a headlong, almost manic momentum, which can be a tad wearying in his long novels, but is nicely suited to the hundred-or-so-page narratives in “Strange Weather.” It’s particularly effective in “Loaded,” with its escalating, incomprehensible (and non-supernatural) mayhem.

And when Hill eases up on the gas pedal a little, as he does from time to time in “Snapshot,” he’s even better. That story, about an old woman’s loss of her self and a fat boy’s development of his, lingers now and then over photographs, which are here synonymous with the memories without which a self is functionally impossible. Hill seems to feel that he can relax some in this one, go a bit deeper, because he trusts his metaphor. Just as Matheson always did.