A Story That Ends with a Scream: And Eight Others

For his new collection of stories, James Leo Herlihy explores the landscape of our time — from Key West in the 1930s to a hippie party in today's Greenwich Village — like a hunter intent upon something far more exhilarating than the kill: life itself. Most of these stories take place in Florida or some other American place where pleasure after a while begins to pall and sunshine becomes as spooky as midnight. Most of the characters are ordinary people living ordinary lives — but living them in such a way that the terror they encounter is inevitable: modern men and women, cut off from themselves, haunted by the fragment that is missing. Nelson Algren, reviewing Herlihy's first volume of stories for the Chicago Sun-Times eight years ago, said, "He writes with an edge of iron that Steinbeck lost and Saroyan never had, a real indignation at humiliation of the human spirit." The edge of iron is still here, and so are the wild humor, the charged immediacy and the vitally accurate dialogue that have won praise in a dozen languages for his novels, Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down.