SOURCE: "Into the Underworlds," in Times Literary Supplement, July 26, 1991, p. 19.

In the following review, Montrose discusses the problems of combining two volumes of Dybek's stories into the British version of The Coast of Chicago.

Eight of the stories in The Coast of Chicago, Stuart Dybek's fine British début, have been selected from a larger volume of the same name published in America last year; the remaining six are from his previous collection, Childhood and Other Neighbourhoods. The titles are apposite. Dybek's fictive territory is his native patch, the Slav and Hispanic districts of Chicago's South Side (frequently during the 1950s, "those years between Korea and Vietnam"); his protagonists are often children and adolescents.

All the earlier stories are third-person narratives, the majority with children serving as the centres of consciousness. Particularly impressive are two in which pairs of children stray into alarming social netherworlds. "The Palatski Man...