When "The Haunted Land" opens, nobody lives at Malin. The house is shabby in its decay, the oleander flowers drift on the wide stretches of what was once a lawn. Under the red cliff of Malin pool, the violence that drove a father to try to frame his children into five shadows of his dead wife has faded….

The farm [in Western Australia] where drenching rains give way to glaring blue sky is presented in the language of a young Thomas Hardy. The reader breathes the winds…. The haunted landscape that surrounds Malin is described in language that intensifies the plight of its peoples. (p. 26)

The situations in this first book by a talented young writer from Down Under are staples of melodrama, but they stand up in the framework of the novel. Writing in a literary tradition, that calls for almost constant action, Mr. Stow employs a...