[In the following review, DeMarinis analyzes the themes of pain and search-and-rescue in Barking Man.]

A collection of short stories that work well together has the effect of standing the reader in a world he recognizes but is no longer on comfortably familiar terms with. Barking Man, Madison Smartt Bell's second collection of stories and seventh book, satisfies the standard with unwavering compassion. The world these 10 stories conjure is a shifty, dangerous place, requiring of its inhabitants small acts of daily heroism. That these heroic deeds sometimes resemble madness or criminal mischief does not compromise their necessity or moral authenticity. If anything, they are all the more laudable because the odds for success are always dismally low. In each case, the reader finds himself cheering for these outgunned characters because Mr. Bell himself cares so deeply about them.

I hesitate to describe the wonderful opening story, "Holding Together", for fear of undermining the gravity of what I've just said. It is a story of heroism and suffering, and of blind injustice. The imprisoned hero is not only subjected to mental torture and physical disfigurement at the "hands" of his fellow prisoners, he also experiences a devastating crisis of belief. His drinking water is laced with insidious, mind-fragmenting drugs and, worse, he gradually comes to realize that he is intended for grievous biological experimentation.

The hero of "Holding Together" is a white mouse. Not your ordinary white mouse—but then who is so knowledgeable about the perception and sensitivity of other creatures as to insist on their ordinariness? This mouse is, rather, an Oriental white mouse who, having committed to memory the entire I Ching, divines his fate by studying the hexagrams revealed by his makeshift yarrow stalks, in hands as skilled as Mr. Bell's, the short story is the most dynamic and flexible of literary forms, and "Holding Together" proves this out. We not only care about this bookish mouse, we suffer his pain and are humbled by his steadfast devotion to his fellow mice and to the values that have made his survival not merely possible but necessary. A story with a more humanistic theme is hard to imagine.

As the stories in Barking Man make plain, survival can be a triumph of the spirit—but it can also be a siege of cruelty. In "Black and Tan," a tobacco farmer suffers, in under two years, the deaths of his wife and his two grown children. When a minister, at the funeral of the man's daughter, tries to console him by saying, "You're surviving. Today's today and then there'll be tomorrow," the farmer replies, "That's right, and it's a curse." Oblivion is preferable to such pain, but the farmer, who has no observable religious views that might see him through his agony, becomes, by pure contrariness and grit, an existential hero who leads a productive and exemplary life, first by breeding dogs and then by turning his home into a shelter for unmanageably delinquent boys.

Pain is the hard stylus that engraves the world of these stories. We see this not only in the duress endured by most of the characters but in the fine line details of their struggles, for which Mr. Bell has a sharp and loving eye. Someone's version of paradise might be the south of France but, like severe sunburn and a beach full of foot bruising pebbles, the French Riviera of "Petit Cachou" is grained with hurt. This Mediterranean vacationland is the stage for a California family's brief descent into purgatory. "Petit Cachou" is an astringent novella in which the lives of utterly dissimilar characters are cleverly braided together in a comedy of adolescent libido and parental dismay. As the expatriate peddler Ton-Ton Detroit, the one character in the story who believes in and respects the treacherous magic of his unpredictable surroundings, reflects, "The world was full of a number of things, many of them possible."

This cautionary proposition can be extended to many of Mr. Bell's stories, subverting and controlling a reality that has lost predictability and definition. In "Dragon's Seed," an impoverished old woman of questionable stability, Mackie Loudon, tries to save a boy from a sadistic child pornographer. Both Mackie and the pornographer live on the crumbling urban fringe, an area indifferently policed and mostly invisible to the selective eye of mainstream society. This isolation provides the setting for a life-and-death struggle that has the moral dimensions of myth.

Many of Mr. Bell's heroes dwell in this disposable outland that exists alongside conspicuous prosperity. Their stories are often about the attempted search and rescue, against impossible odds, of a lost mate or child. In "Move On Up," Mr. Bell puts us squarely on the side of a drifter named Hal, one of society's forgotten members. Such people are not lovable—Mr. Bell is no sentimentalist—but they are observed so acutely and with such brave affection that we suspend our judgment and are compelled to walk the streets in their salvaged shoes. Mr. Bell can convey in a single image—in a park, for example, where "a statue of a man in a three piece suit made an expansive gesture toward the pile of litter at its base"—the inflexibility and blindness of the urban landscape, and in a manner that speaks with the economy of poetry.

The would-be searcher and rescuer in "Finding Natasha" says: "I feel responsible … for everybody…. It's got to be like a long chain of people, see? I take hold of her and she takes hold of somebody else and finally somebody takes hold of you, maybe, and then if every body holds on tight, we all get out of here." This effectively describes the spirit that travels through these admirable stories. It is a spirit that insists there is something in all of us that is still worthy of rescue. And it is what makes Barking Man such a humane and mature book, the work of an important and talented writer.