Bedtime in suburbia is subtly strange in novelist and short story writer Steven Millhauser’s universe.

Words exchanged at the end of the day before the lights are turned out between a husband and his wife; a different conversation with each of 13 wives in 13 beds.

An insomnia cycle: 4 a.m. on a digital clock, illuminating half a century of memories, questions of mortality, and tomorrow’s to-do list. Equal thought given to the voice of God calling in the night and wordplay in the mind of a writer.

The wife beside her sleeping husband, eagerly listening for the thief she is certain returns night after night, knowing he has anticipated her every thought just as she has foreseen his every move.

“Voices in the Night: Stories” is Millhauser’s 2015 collection of short stories set in upstate New York and New England. The author was born in New York City, studied at Columbia and is currently a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel “Martin Dressler.”

Fantasy is not so much the genre of Millhauser’s stories as it is an outgrowth of his protagonists’ failure and disappointment, obsession and dreams. Unanswered questions, shameful – and cherished -?secrets materialize into unexplained happenings, darting shadows in the corner of the room.

But Millhauser’s characters don’t flip on the light switch. Their small terrors are hiding places for dark ideas. Rather than pushing themselves to improve their circumstances, they settle for fantastic reprieve: too-good-to-be-true quick fixes from door-to-door salesmen who stepped off of a street in 1950s America.

In the story “Elsewhere,” the narrator describes an idyllic town unwittingly conjuring the supernatural to relieve their restlessness.

“What was it we wanted? We were doing all right, on the whole, we were happy enough, as things go. Oh, we had our worries, we woke in the night with thoughts of money and death, but our neighborhoods were safe, no one died of hunger in our town, we counted our blessings and knew we’d been spared the worst. We’d looked forward to summer the way we always did: seasons of vacations, seasons of departures from the usual flow of things, but this time there was something left over, as if we’d stretched out our arms wider than the world. Sometimes we had the sense that we were waiting for something, a hint, a sign – waiting for a direction in which we could pour our terrible energy.”

Millhauser’s firsthand knowledge of life in upstate New York comes through in concise, everyday details in his stories: mountain trails and village sidewalks, pennysavers and pickup trucks, yard sales and diner specials. He is adept at creating lazy afternoons by the lake and quiet midnights in small-town backyards. And with that same ease, he distorts what is seen and heard into something else, something wonderfully unknown.