Silver movingly shows how the horror of little deaths might find outlets in the alien and strange, not as explanation but as a way of giving some form to the inexpressible. When Silver is content to demonstrate how figures like these merely reflect ''sociocultural signs of British racism and xenophobia,'' she is terrific. Even finer is the discussion of dwarf-goblin figures as displays of social Darwinism in its crudest forms. Silver touches on well-known literary figures from Mr. Hyde to Wells's Morlocks to show how the dwarf embodied imperialist racism and a variety of disguised forms of fascinated horror. In these stories, the face of evil was female and that evil was aggressive and violent.
Silver is just as acute and surprising in dealing with the decline in fairy popularity.
Also, fairies became too much the subject of crude positivism, attempts to ''prove'' their existence by, for instance, photographing them. The famous Cottingley photographs of 1917 hurt serious fairy thinking by the very intensity of the media glare and the dubious stamp of ''authenticity'' awarded to the photos by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It wasn't so much that the butterfly cut-outs in the photos are fakes as that fairies can hardly thrive if they need ocular proof, Silver says. Quite a falling-off from tales of sidhes leading unwary travelers into bogs. My recommendation is to blot out all the talk about belief, which is much like enjoying the choir and snoozing through the sermon.