At the Edge of the World

""I have not chosen these tales to be safe, lightweight entertainment,"" writes Anglo-Irish photographer Lowings in his introduction to this illustrated collection. ""I have chosen them because they touch on primeval fears and fascinations that, even now, flood up from within us to fill the darkness outside."" Indeed, these 23 ghost stories and fairy tales (gathered from mostly 19th-century folklorists, among them Lady Wilde, T. Crofton Croker and Douglas Hyde) are more suitable for the bedside than the coffee table, Lowings's highly imaginative 40 photographs notwithstanding. Since Lowings has, on his own admission, ""never been able to photograph a fairy fort,"" he settles for desolate landscapes whose fence posts, farmsteads and ruins trace a vanished human presence. None is ""enchanted"" in the ordinary sense; instead, these images conjure up a countryside as full of ghosts as its stories used to be. (Mar.)