SOURCE: Review of Bay of Souls, by Robert Stone. Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 1 (1 January 2003): 24.

In the following review, the critic calls Bay of Souls “a small masterpiece,” contending that the novel is spare, intense, and clear.

Faulknerian intensity and a narrative economy reminiscent of Hemingway distinguish Stone's bloodcurdling seventh outing [Bay of Souls], a tale that charts a midwestern college professor's compulsive path toward self-destruction.

In a magnificent opening chapter, Stone introduces Michael Ahearn, living in Iron Falls, Minnesota, with his wife Kristin and preadolescent son Paul, and seeking the kind of “bliss” he intuits from the vitalist tradition in American fiction (his specialty) in heavy drinking and occasional hunting trips. Returning from one such trip, Michael learns that Paul has almost frozen to death and Kristin has injured herself rescuing him. This incident, and other indistinctly ominous particulars (a dropped flashlight, a slain deer's carcass carried in a...