[Almost] any human movement in Stone's novels becomes, whether this is intended or not, a metaphor for intrusion or intervention, and of the suffering that follows from it. Drugs or alcohol are in that sense also intrusive, a self-inflicted assault on the mind. (p. 37)

A Flag for Sunrise offers anything that can send a body up or down—acid for the hippies, dexies for Pablo, and, for the older folk, lots and lots of booze and grass.

Everyone is tripping out in any way possible, and the different plots are correspondingly fast-paced and phantasmagorically inventive. People only halfway through a joint or a glass of Flor de Cana are transported into a maelstrom of violence, relationships that are as dangerous as they are fortuitous, and brutalities seemingly in excess of what any human body can absorb.

The forward momentum of the narrative is never deflected by the kinds...