SOURCE: Sutherland, John. “In Dangerous Waters.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4651 (22 May 1992): 28.

In the following review, Sutherland criticizes Stone for failing to acknowledge his debt to the documented true story of ill-fated sailor Donald Crowhurst in Outerbridge Reach, upon which the novel is apparently based.

Robert Stone started writing relatively late in life and has accumulated his now considerable reputation slowly. His first published novel, A Hall of Mirrors, came out in 1967. A study of moral decay in New Orleans, it established Stone as a Catholic novelist of the Greenian, “why this is hell, nor am I out of it” mould. A Hall of Mirrors was filmed as WUSA in 1970, starring Paul Newman. The movie helped out Stone on the large cultural map and raised expectations for his second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974). Coinciding as it did with the dirty Peace with Honour years, Dog Soldiers projected a truly infernal...