“All the gorgeously crafted stories in Maureen McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical. How else to describe stories in which a young woman meets a man she’s attracted to at a dog obedience class and discovers that she dreads introducing him to her dead brother (“In the Air”); “Ancestor Money,” in which a bequest entices a woman to leave her comfortable home in the afterlife for a visit to China; or “Laika Comes Back Safe,” the story of two teenagers who are drawn together by the fact that both have unhappy home lives, but whose friendship is doomed because one is a werewolf. “In this collection of stories, Maureen F.