Synopses & Reviews
A new novel from an American master, Bay of Souls is a gripping tale of romantic obsession set against the backdrop of an island revolution. Michael Ahearn is a midwestern English professor who abandons his comfortable life when he becomes obsessed with a new colleague from the Caribbean, Lara Purcell. When Lara claims a vodoun spirit has taken possession of her soul, Michael follows her to her native St. Trinity, only to find himself in a whirlpool of Third World corruption. A finely wrought tale of one man's moral dissolution, Bay of Souls showcases Robert Stone at his most provocative and psychologically acute.
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"[A] tight, brilliantly observed tale....All of Stone's characters here are etched in the acid of hard truth, with Stone probing deep....[A] novel of bold prose and subtle perceptions, a small, hard gem from a master writer." Publishers Weekly
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"[B]loodcurdling....A small masterpiece, possessed of a relentless lucidity that recalls Conrad and Graham Greene at their peaks. Stone's best yet." Kirkus Reviews
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"[A] kind of small gem: perfectly chiseled and revealing an icy clarity at its core that is as frightening as it is hypnotic." Bill Ott, Booklist
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"Lately Robert Stone has specialized in writing novels that combine the rich textures of literary fiction with the exciting stories of thrillers....When Stone pulls it off as he does more often than not in Bay of Souls...the result has a fizzy, unsettling menace....This is the territory of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene..." Laura Miller, Salon.com
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"[F]ascinating....[A] highly concentrated work, probably the least violent yet most unnerving of his novels....It's a pleasure to watch this writer at work as he individualizes his portraits of people gripped by beliefs and passions of unusual intensity." Norman Rush, The New York Times Book Review
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"[N]ot so much Stone Lite as Stone Tight, a concentrated piece of fiction with the same trademarks...as such masterworks as Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise." The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
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"In many ways this is a book of surfaces: the shocking images drawn in Stone's accomplished prose, the easy and telling descriptions....But here as in each of his books, the art is in the concealed depths." The Washington Post Book World
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"Robert Stone fans who felt overwhelmed by [Damascus Gate]...may be relieved to find a smaller cast of characters and a more sharply focused plot....Stone casts a wry, forgiving eye on his characters and their restless hunger for adventure." Boston Herald
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"Robert Stone's new novel is a primer, a compendium of his longer, more sprawling works. It's as if he's condensed his vision, streamlined and briskly shaped it....This is vintage Stone in a shorter, sleeker form." Providence Journal
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"Like Greene's best novels, Bay of Souls is an adventure novel in form only....With steely prose, Stone cuts through to the heart of darkness lurking not in some exotic, far-flung locale, but beating insistently inside any sensitive man." San Antonio Express-News
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"Exotic and chaotic settings, the main character's intense struggle with who he or she really is and lean, muscular writing are hallmarks of Stone's fiction. His latest, Bay of Souls, doesn't stray from that successful formula." Glenn O'Neal, USA Today
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"In many ways, Bay of Souls feels like Damascus Gate on a crash diet....[It] is a very good book that suffers not from bad writing or a weak story or uninteresting characters or a trivial theme, but from not enough Robert Stone." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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"[T]here is little that is original in Bay of Souls the material is solipsistic and self-referential and this trivializes a tale meant to be universal in scope. Stone uses the archetypes to reach for greatness, but in my opinion he falls short." BookReporter
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"I've long been an admirer of [Stone's] work, but Bay of Souls is much less textured than previous efforts....[T]his book just doesn't match the emotion, the tension or the moral weight of Damascus Gate." Minneapolis Star Tribune
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"[T]he book morphs from a midlife masterpiece into a thriller in the style of the 1970s, a cliche-ridden narrative....In the end, it's worth paging through...because Stone is dazzling when he's dazzling." Los Angeles Times
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"[A] stunning work, a profound and profoundly moving meditation tethered to a runaway train....It's a distillation, into stylized prose, of the visceral essence of the tale, and the effect is dizzying, thrilling..." San Diego Union-Tribune
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"A short, compact novel boasting the meaty, thoughtfulness of literary magnum opus and the wiry frame of a ripping thriller....[A] terse, well-crafted portrait of a man trapped in a hell of his own making." Denver Post
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"[A] middling addition to Stone's body of work, but second-rate Stone, with its topicality, lush scenes and earnest handling of the supernatural, is still superior to much of the fiction on the market today." Miami Herald
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"Occasionally the virtuoso Stone of the past emerges Michael's dive into the wrecked plane has a strong you-are-there actuality. Bay of Souls may satisfy Stone's many admirers, but I doubt that it will win him any new ones." San Jose Mercury News
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"Bay of Souls builds an excellent, if well-worn, plot from the snowy, windswept campus of a rural university....Stone's writing is powerful and often gripping, and that strength alone makes Bay of Souls worthwhile." Rocky Mountain News
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"Bay of Souls takes all of this important writer's motifs to a new and unanticipated level of scrutiny." Chicago Tribune
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"Bay of Souls has the soul of a novel but the terse intimacy of a short story, and like its flawed protagonist on that perilous trip to the deep, it goes down too far to come up so fast." Boston Globe
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"[T]his trip south to a land of voodoo and lost souls feels decadent, silly and terribly insincere." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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"It reads not only like a bad pastiche of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Joan Didion and V. S. Naipaul, served up in portentous, self-important prose, but also like a bad pastiche of Mr. Stone's own earlier fiction." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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"Other novelists strain for profundity; Stone shows us that soul-wrenching catastrophe is a misstep away." Seattle Times
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"Robert Stone is a master of language, herding words into a hypnotic circle that suggests each phrase is carefully weighed and measured." Entertainment Weekly
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"Bay of Souls becomes, page by page, increasingly hypnotic, crescendoing into a feverish, unforgettable conclusion." Adrienne Miller, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
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"Bay of Souls is minor Stone in scope and length....But it is full of splendid writing, and the third-person narration is marked by frisky, subtle elisions....As a novelist, Stone is of course even more securely trapped than Michael: he can protest literary vitalism only literarily, and his novel's biggest point "Without physical courage...there is no moral courage" may seem derivative too, of Hemingway. But you've got to admire any novel and this is one that actually yearns to put its money where its mouth is." Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic review)
Synopsis
Robert Stone's remarkable novel is a psychological thriller of razor-sharp intensity: mysterious, erotic, and deeply readable.
Michael Ahearn, a professor at a rural college, sheds his comfortable assumptions when he becomes obsessed with a new faculty member from the Caribbean, Lara Purcell. An expert in Third World politics, Lara is seductive, dangerous -- and in thrall, she claims, to a voodoo spirit who has taken possession of her soul.
Impassioned and determined, Michael pursues Lara to her native island of St. Trinity, heedless of the political upheaval there. Together they desperately attempt to reclaim all that Lara has lost. Yet island intrigue ensnares them. Lara sacrifices herself to ritual and superstition. Michael is caught unawares in a high-stakes smuggling scheme. In his feverish state of mind, the world becomes an ever-shifting phantasmagoria. He is, himself, possessed.
In Bay of Souls, readers will recognize the trademarks of Stone's greatest fiction: the American embroiled in Third World corruption, the diplomats and covert operatives, the idealists and opportunists. Yet here the author's sights are set inward, to a place where politics is superfluous, experience unreliable. Never before has Stone probed so powerfully the psychological depths of one man's mind. What he finds there defies expectations.
Synopsis
When English professor Michael Ahearn falls for a seductive, dangerous new faculty member from the Caribbean, his choices have disastrous consequences in this gripping tale of romantic obsession set against the backdrop of an island revolution.
About the Author
Robert Stone is the author of six previous novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.