Robert Stone has published only three novels in 14 years, but they have established him as one of the most interesting and gifted novelists in America. He is also slightly out of the run of current American fiction by seeming not to share his colleagues' fascination with their own egos.

Even in his first book, 'A Hall of Mirrors,' which was intermittently brilliant but hectic and florid, as though its anguish and distaste were more than he was yet equipped to handle, he seemed above all concerned with the traditional business of fiction: narrative, character and drama which develop their own energy and create their own rules regardless of the author's personal foibles. He makes himself felt not as a personality on display but as a cast of mind illuminating the story he has to tell.

[Both 'Dog Soldiers' and 'A Flag for Sunrise'] belong to the genre...