Lonely and frustrated lives are explored in this new collection from the National Book Award–winning author of Dog Soldiers. Stone's evocative prose treads through the murky waters of dead dreams and waning hopes, bringing out the pathetic and nasty side of people warped by addiction, sex, violence and time. Characters are almost blind to redemption, like the alcoholic professor-artist of “The Archer” who lashes out at a world that wants to celebrate him, or the Silicon Valley executive in “From the Lowlands” who has built a mansion, only to discover that no matter how much of the world you conquer, there's always something hunting you. “High Wire,” a story about a Hollywood screenwriter's on again/off again affair and friendship with a bipolar actress, condenses the years between “the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton” into a wrenching treatise on love, addiction, success and failure. Stone doesn't just let his wounded characters whimper in the corner. He turns them loose on a world hard enough to knock them down but indifferent enough to not care about them once they're gone. (Jan.)

Stone (The Dog Soldiers) here returns to the short story form, offering characters that are unsentimental yet not unreasonable and take enough rope both to entangle and to hang themselves as they move through years of "man-woman relationships." Throughout, the scenery lies on the troublesome edges of Hollywood, academia, and bars, and Stone's pared, precise lines take on the lyrical authority of morality tales: "Leroy traveled east into the high country pursued by little sense of sin. He had made a lot of money being no worse than anyone else in the San Francisco Peninsula data business and in his way contributing a lot." Yet the players are not without moments of shimmering revelry or self-awareness of the heights, as in "From the Lowlands," in which a cocky businessman finally gets his reckoning as he clings to life on an inflatable ball in a poolside encounter with a panther. There's a dark humor at play here, the laughter of the rehab houses implied in the title. Few other writers could use a phrase like civic poetry so conversationally and have it be so cogent. VERDICT Readers who enjoy the caustic prose of Mary Gaitskill or Lee K. Abbott will gladly take this book to bed with them. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]—Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL

Alienated, angry outsiders stalk the dangerous edges of their unraveling lives in the great American novelist's collection of grim short fiction. The mordant pleasures begin with a perfectly chosen epigraph, much too good to give away. Then we plunge headlong into Stone country (Bay of Souls, 2003, etc.) with the title story's unsparing portrayal of a weary criminal lawyer's addled relations with his nothing job in a nowhere place, and with a female prison psychologist whose demons are more than a match for his own. Hemingway is skillfully channeled in the perfectly pitched "Honeymoon," taut as a trip-wire as it shows a newly married man sinking under the weight of his obsession with his ex-wife, and in "Charm City," the heartless tale of a weak married man courting romantic adventure, the predatory woman who expertly encircles him and the momentum of self-destruction that consumes every wasted life herein displayed. Stone stumbles slightly in his portrait of an incipiently burnt-out scriptwriter and the emotionally unstable actress who sashays ever more destructively in and out of his life over the years ("High Wire," which echoes a little too closely his 1986 Hollywood novel Children of Light), and in "The Archer," which chronicles the outrageous sociopathology of a vagrant college art prof whose middle age, we guess, might be the one J.P. Donleavy's Ginger Man would grow into. Mastery re-emerges in "From the Lowlands," the crisp, Ambrose Bierce-like fable of an electronics mogul whose lavish western mountain retreat can't insulate him from the shadowed clutch of nemeses approaching. Equally fine is "The Wine-Dark Sea," in which a renegade journalist crashes an island policy conferencehosted by an increasingly unhinged U.S. Secretary of Defense-Caliban meets Conrad's "Mistah Kurtz," as incisive literary allusions and pistol-whip prose conspire to create a hilariously funereal Gotterdammerung. Vintage Stone. Enough said.