Although God is often associated with food -- manna, fishes, milk and honey -- the devil has quite a culinary repertoire himself. In fact, food and the devil go way back. It's the apple he gives to Eve that provides one of the Bible's first lessons: When you take a bite of something, you never know quite what you will get.

Food-borne anxiety permeates our lives to this day. In gourmet kitchens and stylish bistros, we worship pristine meals made from the freshest or most exotic ingredients. At the same time, we are plagued by an undercurrent of fear that food can injure or kill us with unseen toxins, cholesterol, or allergens. As you bite into that pâté, you never know quite what (cancer, e.coli, a heart attack?) you will get.

In a world in which food is both our salvation and our damnation, Jim Crace may be the Martha Stewart from Hades. In the 64 parables that make up The Devil's Larder, food serves as a conduit for death, illness, revenge, and other unsavory aspects of humanity. While Martha's immaculate kitchen rituals attempt to banish sickness and mortality, Crace's little book offers up a big steaming platter of dread and decay. Enticing gourmet meals turn into merciless bouts of botulism; delightful out-of-the-way restaurants serve up guilt or humiliation.

The book's title is something of a ruse itself, however; there is no devil and there is no God in Jim Crace's universe. For Crace, a self-professed "dyed-in-the-wool God-denier…. a North Korean style, heavy-duty atheist," only the sensible, earthly world exists. Food, then -- our means of communion with that world and with each other -- makes for him an ideal subject of contemplation.

And a treacherous subject it is. Some of Crace's best pieces revel in that moment when bourgeois repasts -- a fancy meal, a genteel picnic -- erupt into deceit, disease, or death. A well-to-do hotel patron hires a boat to go fishing under "a beryl sky," bringing along the hotel's prepared Gourmet Picnic Lunch for Anglers -- never to return. "The culprit was a home-baked mini-pastry which Chef had filled with country-canned asparagus. Low-acid vegetables that have been canned by amateurs at room temperature, it seems, are rich in vitamins and poisons."

In The Devil's Larder it's human relations, more than the actual victuals, that are poisonous. A boy is offered a carrot from his neighbor, a man rumored to defecate on his own crops and shunned by the boy and his family. Too embarrassed to decline, the boy takes a bite. It is the sweetest carrot he has ever tasted. "If it was not the flavour of the soil that made the difference, then perhaps it was the taste of fear and shame." Another character intentionally induces in herself a violent allergic reaction because "she would rather die than show her face, would rather swell to twice her size than add her small voice to the hymns" at her own sister's funeral.

While Crace's vignettes offer large helpings of despair and cruelty (albeit leavened with dark humor), occasionally something warm and sustaining is to be had. In one of the last tales in the collection, a widow tries to soothe her loss by putting a pinch of her recently deceased husband's ashes into her cooking. She finds no peace of mind, however. An understanding doctor tells her: "You can't eat grief. It's far too strong and indigestible. You have to let the grief eat you. You have to let the sorrow swallow you. Then put his ashes in the earth and let him go." Just because there is no God does not mean that there are no moments of sweetness, of redemption.

But The Devil's Larder is by no means a comforting book. Readers may feel like the obsessed diners in one story, who embark on an arduous journey to a remote restaurant that serves a much sought-after dish whose ingredients are never revealed, although cannibalism is hinted at. As they cross through a river along the way, the narrator remarks, "We're wading too, of course, into the dark side of ourselves, the hungry side that knows no boundaries."

As we wade into that dark water, we can't help wading into theological territory. This is the paradox of Crace's writing: Just as religion has from the beginning relied upon the language of hunger and of food, we can't talk about food -- or death, deceit, or love, for that matter -- without evoking the language of religion. Whether Crace himself hates or loves God, then, is ultimately less important than his exceptional ability to mull the bitter fruits, and the occasional honey, to be found in this world.