Wild Women

""Many women have had their primal selves stifled by restrictive societies,"" Hall states in her introduction to this lackluster collection of contemporary inspirational prose and poetry, some original and some reprinted, which takes its title from a passage in Women Who Run with the Wolves. Many of the female characters in the selected works do loose their primal selves with wild abandon, but their creators seem not to have worried much about writing well in concocting their frequently preposterous plots. Several stories are concerned with familiar fairy tales and myths: Tinkerbell chastises Wendy for acting as a mother in Pat Cadigan's ""Lost Girls""; an elderly Alice travels to Wonderland again in Jane Yolen's ""Rabbit Hole."" Not surprisingly, the strongest pieces are contributed by accomplished authors, whose subtlety is all the more welcome because their writing reveals a wildness in the ordinary sense rather than in the silly or outrageous. In Joyce Carol Oates's ""Haunted,"" for instance, an old woman recalls trespassing on the properties of abandoned farms--and the transgression's deadly consequences. Hall is to be commended for including several stories by men (Edward Bryant, Joe R. Lansdale, John A. Day, among them), especially given the antagonism toward men evidenced in some of the entries. As a celebration of women and as an inspiration for them, however, this anthology largely disappoints, especially in the entries from newer writers. (June)