Whether she's opening up old wounds or creating uncomfortable scenarios, her work is always intelligent, insightful, darkly humorous and reliably cynical.
Her latest collection of short stories, Stone Mattress, is no exception, with all nine ''tales'' involving death or murder in some form.
There's the widow guided through a storm by the voice of her dead husband; the author who plots to get his book rights back; and the woman handed a golden opportunity to avenge a past wrong with a perfectly planned Arctic murder.
Three of the tales have been published before (including I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth, which revisits the characters in Atwood's The Robber Bride) but all feel as if they belong in this collection, which returns time and again to the themes of betrayal, regret and the indignity and vulnerability of ageing.
Nowhere is this vulnerability more apparent than in the final story, Torching the Dusties, in which rest-home residents come under attack from protesters determined to clear out the old to make way for the young.
Throughout the collection Atwood aims her biting humour in all sorts of directions - poetry, Pilates, fantasy conventions, sexy vampires - and her work is, as ever, ambiguous.
As one character says: ''Fun is not knowing how it will end.''
And here, even when the story is finished, you can't be sure how the tale will end.
• Laura Hewson is an Allied Press subeditor.
