The critically acclaimed Chicago-based writer Jac Jemc teaches, among other places, at Story Studio Chicago, where she leads the Novel in a Year: Speculative Fiction class, guiding students to produce manuscripts that draw upon strange and sinister elements. According to the course description, this includes “fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism, transgressive, new weird, and various related sub-genres (for example, alternative history, or steampunk).”

Looking over her career to date, it’s easy to see why Jemc would be ideally positioned to head such a class. Her own atmospheric and hard-to-categorize work — including 2017’s haunted house novel “The Grip of It” — is expertly unsettled and unsettling. Her latest book, “False Bingo,” a collection of 20 stylish and psychologically tense stories, continues this trajectory, leading the reader into realms full of dread and suspense, weirdness and wonder, paranoia and pain.

In “Don’t Lets,” a woman recovering from an abusive relationship holes up at a lonely vacation rental in the South that turns out to have been a plantation, now possibly visited by the Gullah ghost the boo hag, a creature “like a bogeyman” or “a vampire, but they don’t take your blood. They take your breath.” In “Half Dollar,” an homage to Shirley Jackson, two girls play a cruel practical joke on a grieving widow. And in “Hunt and Catch,” a woman commuting home from work by bus believes she’s being followed by a garbage truck driver.

Although ghosts occasionally populate her tales, Jemc is less M.R. James and more Robert Aickman. Rarely relying on obvious chills or violence, her stories — as surreal as they are scary — dwell in the realm of the upsetting yet pleasingly confounding. Ultimately, it’s the details of reality — the things that can and do happen all the time — that make the stories shine, for Jemc knows how to use mundanity to throw the truly bizarre into sharp relief. In “Delivery” for instance, narrated in the first-person plural by a set of siblings, the father of a family becomes addicted to ordering electronics off QVC. By the end, the reader is left with a parable that comments — obliquely, disturbingly — on both materialism and dementia.

Jemc’s erudite, offbeat sense of humor contributes brilliantly to the collection’s pervasive unease as often as does anything overtly supernatural. In “The Principal’s Ashes,” the central premise is that Mrs. Sayer, an unorthodox teacher, plans to cap the school year by having her class of second-graders perform Allen Ginsberg’s transgressive poem “Howl.” Yet eerily, this pedagogically suspect proposition fails to draw a peep of protest as “even Rara’s mother won’t complain about how her daughter walks around the house repeating a couplet that contains the word

‘ass.’ ”

A highly literary writer who takes delight in the smallest elements of language, Jemc masterfully uses personification in apt but jittery ways, as when a character with a broken leg says, “I felt ache rummage through my bones and I reached for my crutches.” The same goes for metaphor, as when she writes of the protagonist of the story “Strange Loop,” “John was a frame of madly hung trouble.” Or when the narrator of “Under/Over,” serving out her punishment for an unjustly earned DUI, says that “in the hours after volunteering, class, therapy, I felt like a cymbal clang of myself.” Even Jemc’s syntax itself can become agitated and agitating.

Twenty stories might sound like a lot, but the book flies by, because Jemc knows how to deploy brevity and irresolution. Story after story exhibits the understanding that it’s usually creepier to wonder than to know. Yet she never makes the reader feel like she’s simply messing around. Perhaps most effective is her awareness that scariness gets even scarier when it’s intercut with, as the title of one story puts it, “Gladness or Joy.” That story ends with “ ‘Listen to this,’ your friend says. You wait,” and in this collection, Jemc feels like the friend you listen to with nervous anticipation.

Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk”; her novel “Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey” is due in fall 2020.