The characters in "The Golden Key and Other Stories" find themselves wandering the border between the known world and the realm of the unreal, struggling to understand their desires and the way those desires shape the stories they have to tell. "The Golden Key" and "Lakeview" draw on folk tales, one about a chance discovery of an unlikely object, the other about a wife's longing to leave her family. "The Garden" and "The Hollow" both find young girls struggling to reconstruct their pasts, while "Alfa Whiskey Echo" and "Lady with an Ermine" see adult women dealing with the ramifications of childhood events, some fantastical, others all too real. In "May Queen" and "Langwidere", obsession with beauty takes on monstrous proportions, with disastrous results. The historical figures who populate "Charlotte" and "When I am laid in earth" slip into impossible situations, impelled to narrate their own stories from beyond the grave.