Entertainment Weekly
Robert Stone is a master of language, herding words into a hypnotic circle that suggests each phrase is carefully weighed and measured.
The San Francisco Chronicle
Bay of Souls, takes us from a sleepy American college town to the fictitious Caribbean island of St. Trinity, all for an ambitious, outlandish danse macabre involving CIA puppets and voodoo priestesses.—David Kipen
USA Today
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
The New York Times
That is the lurid entanglement lying at the heart of Bay of Souls, the latest addition to Robert Stone's dark canon. It's a fascinating addition. Unusual (for Stone) in its brevity, this is a highly concentrated work, probably the least violent yet most unnerving of his novels. And the philosophical conflict dramatized in it ends surprisingly, in a way that provokes new questions about what Stone is up to in his writing. — Norman Rush
The Washington Post
In many ways this is a book of surfaces: the shocking images drawn in Stone's accomplished prose, the easy and telling descriptions, the jazzy evocations of infinitely complex political realities, the sometimes facile resort to adventure. But here as in each of his books, the art is in the concealed depths. — Neil Gordon
Publishers Weekly
Stone's shortest novel, and his first in five years (after Damascus Gate, 1998), is a tight, brilliantly observed tale of one man's moral dissolution. Michael Ahearn is a respected professor of literature at a small college in the upper Midwest, with a lovely wife and 12-year-old son, but a vague dissatisfaction gnaws at him, exacerbated by a frightening incident while deer hunting and the near-death of his son from exposure. When Michael meets a new professor, the beautiful and electrifying Lara Purcell, he falls under her spell and launches an affair, endangering his marriage and his relationship with his son. At Lara's prompting, Michael travels with her to her Caribbean island home of St. Trinity, a nation rife with political violence, where Lara hopes to repossess the soul she believes has been captured by a voodoo goddess. The narrative undergoes a tonal shift on the troubled, threatening island, with events unfolding in a more intense, then nearly hallucinatory way, especially as Michael is himself possessed during a voodoo ceremony in which Lara hopes to reclaim her soul. A brief return to the U.S. mainland closes the novel on a somber note. All of Stone's characters here are etched in the acid of hard truth, with Stone probing deep-particularly into Michael, a sensitive, at times courageous man whose lust for the divine, for transcendence or salvation, is spoiled by a self-deception and self-indulgence that lead him astray and finally turn his life to ash. This is a novel of bold prose and subtle perceptions, a small, hard gem from a master writer. 7-city author tour; simultaneous unabridged audio. (Apr. 22) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Michael Ahearn is an English professor at a backwater Midwestern university, generally content in career, marriage, and fatherhood. Everything changes when he becomes fascinated by an exotic new professor, Lara Parcell, and enters into an incendiary relationship with her. When he follows her on a supposed diving expedition to her revolt-plagued native island (where she hopes to reclaim her soul and extricate her family from extralegal complications), things change even more. Lara succumbs to ritual, and the only diving Michael does-to retrieve contraband from a shot-down tail dragger-nearly kills him. Back in the Midwest after this trip to hell (as he takes it), Michael finds himself sick, near divorce, and regarded as a pariah. Months later, a weird back-roads encounter with Lara, just a ways from a redneck honky-tonk, is almost (or perhaps really) phantasmagoric. Stone (Damascus Gate) is at his best here, and that's very, very good. This starts like Richard Russo, evolves into Joseph Conrad, and resolves almost as Daniel Woodrell. Highly recommended.-Robert E. Brown, Minoa Lib., NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Faulknerian intensity and a narrative economy reminiscent of Hemingway distinguish Stone’s bloodcurdling seventh outing (Damascus Gate, 1998, etc.), 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 wheelbarrow), foreshadow Ahearn’s hallucinatory free fall, conceived as "the purifying effect of struggle," but realized as obsessive infatuation with an alluring colleague, political-science professor Lara Purcell. Michael follows Lara to the embattled Caribbean island of St. Trinity, ostensibly so that she can attend a "ceremony of reclamation" for the soul of her late brother, an AIDS victim, and sell their family’s property: the Bay of Souls Hotel. Instead, Lara succumbs to the irrational power of the island’s voudon culture, and Michael—coincidentally an experienced diver—is persuaded to brave the depths of a coral reef, where an airplane carrying mysterious contraband has sunk. An ongoing island war, a "peacekeeping" military junta, unidentified American interests, Colombian militias, and various adventurers and burnt-out cases are the ingredients of a compact sulfurous melodrama whoseworking-out convinces the mesmerized Ahearn that St. Trinity is in fact hell (and Lara its likely agent), nor is he out of it. A perfectly calibrated ironic final chapter brings the story to a stunning full-circle conclusion. A small masterpiece, possessed of a relentless lucidity that recalls Conrad and Graham Greene at their peaks. Stone’s best yet. Author tour
