In one of his poems, D. H. Lawrence speaks of a creature whose origin predates not only man, but God—a creature born "before God was love"—and it is precisely this sense of a natural world predating and excluding consciousness that Paul Bowles dramatizes so powerfully in [his "Collected Stories"]. It is no accident that the doomed professor (of linguistics) in the story "A Distant Episode" loses his tongue before he loses his mind and his humanity—a captive of an outlaw tribe in the Sahara; nor is it by mere chance that an American girl, visiting her mother and her mother's lesbian companion in Colombia (in "The Echo") succumbs to an irrational violence more alarming than any she has ever witnessed. Attacking her mother's lover, she "uttered the greatest scream of her life"—pure sound, bestial and liberating.

Too much has been made, perhaps, of the dream-like brutality of Bowles's imagination, which evokes a horror far more persuasive than anything in Poe; or in Gide (whom Bowles peripherally resembles). But the stories, like fairytales, tend to dissolve into their elements because so little that is human in a psychological sense is given. The reader is usually outside Bowles's characters…. (p. 9)

[Stories] in which nothing explicitly violent happens, stories that would probably not offend the average genteel reader … create an unnerving suspense by virtue of Bowles's masterly craft. He has learned from Hemingway as well as from that other 20th-century master of short fiction, D. H. Lawrence; even his descriptions are wonderfully dramatic. Nothing is extraneous, nothing is wasted. If one wants, at times, more humanity—more "consciousness"—surely this is a naïve prejudice, a wish that art always and forevermore affirm our human vantage point, as if the brute implacable otherness of the natural world were no more threatening than a painted backdrop for an adventure film.

Though Bowles's marvelous landscapes call to mind Lawrence, it is misleading to read Bowles in the light of Lawrence. Even in Lawrence's coldest, most "legendary" tales, where landscape overcomes humanity …, one confronts and, to some extent, enters into the lives of recognizable human beings whose personalities are always convincing; and this is not true in Bowles. Lawrence's people are like us, Bowles's people tend to be our very distant kin, shadowy and remote, unclaimable. One cannot imagine Bowles creating a Constance Chatterley or a Mellors, trembling with apprehension of each other, or a Gerald (of "Women in Love"), so susceptible to erotic passion that he chooses death rather than a life without the woman he desires. "Desire" in Bowles's fiction—"Under the Sky," for instance, where a Mexican peasant rapes an American woman—is no more articulated than the emotion of the deranged professor of linguistics. Bowles does not write about sexual love, like many contemporary writers, in order to challenge its mythology; he does not write about it at all. His interests lie elsewhere.

[This] collection, a companion to "The Thicket of Spring" (1972), which brought together four decades of Bowles's poetry, should strengthen the author's somewhat amorphous position in our literature. Like Bowles's novels, the best of these stories are beautifully fashioned, and as bleakly unconsoling as the immense deserts about which he writes with such power. They have a way of lingering in the memory for decades—disturbing, vexing, like a partly-recalled dream. The reader is advised to approach them with caution, however, limiting himself to one or two at a sitting, beginning perhaps with the wonderful "Pastor Dowe at Tacaté." For these are stories set in an epoch "before God was love," and beside them most acclaimed fiction of our time—brightly and nervously ironic, or dutifully attuned to the latest "moral" problems—seems merely shallow. (pp. 9, 29)