The beginning of A. Alvarez's review of Robert Stone's fourth novel, Children of Light (1986), stands as the best concise summary of Stone's achievement that has yet been published:

In just four novels in almost twenty years Robert Stone has established a world and style and tone of voice of great originality and authority. It is a voice without grace or comfort, bleak, dangerous, and continually threatening.... Stone has a Hobbesian view of life -- nasty, brutish and short -- but it is also fiercely contemporary and not just because he has a marvelous ear for the ellipses and broken rhythms and casual obscenity of the way people talk now. Stone is contemporary because he takes for granted the nihilism that seems to be a legacy of the Vietnam War, that fracturing of the sensibility which began in the Sixties with disaffected young and continues, in these more conservative...