AS 30th birthdays go, Kirsty Logan's was enviably good, even if it was "possibly the most hectic week of my entire life".

What made it so was not just that her debut short story collection was published but also that she sold a novel for a substantial sum to Harvill Secker, the publishing house which, in its long and illustrious history, has published no fewer than 20 Nobel Prize-winners and four Booker Prize-winners.

At the end of the week, understandably frazzled, Logan, who by day is literary editor at The List magazine, took off to Loch Fyne with her partner Annie. "Breathing mist on stony beaches, wine and horror novels in the hotel bar," is how she summarised it for her 2600 followers on Twitter.

"It has just been so completely hectic and unexpected," she says, back in the Glasgow home she shares with Annie and their dog Rosie. "What a chaos it has been."

The novel, The Gracekeepers, which is not due out until spring of next year, is an elaboration of one of the adult fairytales in The Rental Heart - which, it should be said, is an alarmingly good short story collection: concise, vividly written and full of dark, arresting imagery.

The phrase magic realism has been used in relation to Logan's writing, while her own publishers, Salt, describe her, boldly but with some justification, as the "lovechild of Angela Carter and Michel Faber". One critic has cited Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson.

The Rental Heart is also, in places, sexually frank, notably in tales such as Underskirts, the multiple-viewpoint account of a noblewoman who is drawn to the girls of the village (and they to her) and who, at the story's end, is locked away; she has become an anchoress, one who has retired from the secular world.

The story, which took third place in the 2010 Bridport Prize, is full of captivating, silky prose. "Our discarded skirts," observes a female guest who finds herself caught up in the noblewoman's ways, "were piled high as a church steeple and our throats hummed with lust and we felt honey flow from our bodies and finally the lady sat at the peak of a tangle of girl-limbs and surveyed her kingdom, when in walked the Lord." In an interview on the Pank literary arts online magazine, Logan, asked how she had negotiated the fine line between literature and pornography in the story, responded adroitly: "The key is fancy metaphors."

In the end, enclosed with "bare walls and silenced voices", the Lady can never be parted from her convictions or her memories: "My fingers fit into the gaps between the bricks. The moon is the size of my eye. The buttermilk and the daisies, the redness inside cheeks and within the holiest of holies, within the edges of a girl, and this is grace, and this is glory."

Logan has long been fascinated by the idea of these medieval anchoresses. "They would," she says, "be bricked up inside - not to die, though; they would live a long life. They were seen as religious figures, and were known as anchoresses because they would anchor the town and be seen as inspirational by the local people.

"Underskirts came from a painting in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam - Portrait Of Guus Preitinger, by Kees van Dongen. I'd never heard of the painter but there was just something about the painting, an absolutely beautiful painting of this very sensual yet almost aggressive woman. The story just came from there."

Another of the stories in The Rental Heart, Coin-Operated Boys ("That August, Elodie Selkirk became the latest lady in Paris to order a coin-operated boy") showcases Logan's inventiveness. It was inspired "by a song called Coin-Operated Boy, by the Dresden Dolls. I don't even like the song that much; it's just that something about it stuck with me. I had wanted to write a Victoriana-type story for a while."

In Origami, the second-to-last story here, a lonely woman compensates for her partner's prolonged absence on the oil rigs by fashioning a sort-of partner out of paper: intestines made out of folded newspaper, a tongue from a bus ticket, fingers and toes from the pages of a TV guide.

"I used to have a boyfriend who was in the Merchant Navy, and he was away for more than six months of the year," explains Logan. "It was a very strange time. A lot of people were surprised that I still had a boyfriend, but this was a time when I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted, and I didn't really know if I wanted to be with a man or a woman at that point.

"I would quite often, and not even on purpose, literally sort of substitute; you would try to get certain elements of being in a relationship, though you wouldn't want to cross the line into it being actual infidelity. You'd have these weird little pseudo-affairs where you weren't actually a couple, or doing anything, just using each other for an emotional connection."

Another story, Bibliophagy, about a man utterly addicted to eating words, had its roots in something even more personal for Logan. "Throughout my 20s my dad got quite ill. He had a lot of problems with alcohol and things like that, and he developed Parkinson's, so he was quite fragile. That was quite tough.

"He died a few years ago. The whole experience, of him initially being ill then becoming such a different person, was a difficult one. He really loved me and he had been there for us when we needed him. So it was difficult, but then a lot of people in their 20s and 30s see their parents start to get old.

"Throughout it all, I learned to write in metaphor more. The story, Bibliophagy, was the only way I could really write about my dad, and how I just didn't understand why he did the things that he did. It was the first time I'd experienced something that was just so big and difficult that I couldn't write about it directly."

Books and stories and words are part of who Logan is. It's not just that she graduated (in 2009) from Glasgow University's Creative Writing MLitt with distinction; it's also that, while she was growing up, she had the run of her parents' formidable library and as a result came into contact with "really inappropriate" books, such as Crash by JG Ballard, at a young age.

An uncle who is a Buddhist gave her books of Buddhist stories. Her gran gave her a book on Egyptian mythology. She also remembers a book of Bible stories. "They were all fascinating stories, and they got me into this way of thinking that everything is a story and that everything had meaning as well."

Logan co-edits the "flash fiction" magazine Fractured West, and her short fiction and poetry have been published in print and online, recorded for radio and podcasts, and even been exhibited in galleries. As befits someone who has done so well before turning 30, she has considerable potential. The Rental Heart is only the beginning. Watch her go.

The Rental Heart And Other Fairytales is published by Salt Publishing, priced £9.99. The book is launched tonight at Waterstone's, Argyle Street, Glasgow, at 6pm