NO MERCY

By Paul Gray

Robert Stone's fans have had to content themselves, so far, with the five novels that he has published sporadically over the past 30 or so years. A sixth is scheduled to arrive in bookstores this fall, but the wait should be soothed by Bear and His Daughter (Houghton Mifflin; 222 pages; $24), a collection of six Stone short stories that have appeared in magazines plus a previously unpublished novella that gives the new volume its name. All seven pieces demonstrate, in concentrated form, the qualities that make Stone's novels so harrowing, exhilarating and impossible to forget.

In Under the Pitons, for example, an Irishman named Blessington embarks on a Caribbean drug run that proves more terrifying than he could have imagined. His French partner seems headed toward paranoid violence. Worse still is Blessington's memory of the men who sold them the dope. They had asked for "Frenchy," and Blessington, trying to appear in control, said they would have to wait until his partner arrived. "They drew themselves up around their hidden weaponry behind a silent, drug-glazed wall of suspicion that looked impermeable to reason. They were zombies, without mercy, and he, Blessington, was wasting their time." Into this "odor of menace" strolls Blessington's girlfriend, looking for trouble.

"Odor of menace" is an apt description of Stone's fictional atmospherics. His people either find themselves in, or get themselves into, situations of understated but hair-raising peril. In Porque No Tiene, Porque Le Falta, two druggy friends of an equally druggy American poet living in Mexico want to take him to see a nearby volcano. "The way," the poet is told once the trip has begun, "is to go up the mountain and make it all complete." In Helping, a man sober for 18 months starts drinking again. He tells his distraught wife that "this drink I'm having is the only worthwhile thing I've done in the last year and a half." The morning after, he assesses the repercussions. "There would be damn little justice and no mercy."

One of Stone's stories is in fact called Absence of Mercy; nearly all his people believe themselves cut off from any possible solace and forgiveness. The novella Bear and His Daughter portrays the explosive meeting of two such lost souls: a drunken poet on a reading tour in the Mountain States and his illegitimate daughter, who is now 31 and a park ranger packing a pistol. Her boyfriend, fearing what may come of the father's visit, tells her, "I hope God helps you. You should ask him."

These stories make clear what the longer expanses of his novels tend to obscure: Stone is, for all the glittery bleakness of his plots and settings, at heart a metaphysical writer, intensely interested--as was Flannery O'Connor--in the fate of people who cannot find a reason for their existence. The husband in Helping who falls off the wagon tries to defend himself by attacking his religious wife: "Sometimes I try to imagine what it's like to believe that the sky is full of care and concern." The remark wounds, as intended, but the speaker and all the sufferers in this remarkable collection know it is a cry of pain.

--By Paul Gray