This is not a book [Bear and His Daughter] for the squeamish. There are only seven short stories in the collection, but these few tales describe an array of horrors worthy of Greek tragedy: incest, adultery and patricide all put in an appearance. One story features aborted foetuses. Elsewhere, small children perish by falling through thin ice on a skating expedition; a toddler whines in a grubby cot, unheeded by her drug-addicted parents; people drown. Even landscape is merciless, whether it's the suffocating ‘smell of thick-fleshed green things’ in a jungle, or the bleak Reno highway where ‘a sad wind blew across the creosote plain’. There is no such thing as home, here: the only refuge these characters know is the bottle.

You'd have to be a damn good writer to justify such material, and Robert Stone is. Well known in his native America—he is writer in residence at Yale and a stalwart of the New Yorker establishment—his five novels are all but unobtainable here. A new novel, Damascus Gate, is forthcoming in the States and if Bloomsbury are sensible they will snap it up. Richard Ford and Don DeLillo have attracted British readers: Stone deserves to be next in line for promotion.

The biographical note supplied here is scant, but from his subjects it would be fair to surmise that he served in Vietnam and has since been on first-name terms with the proprietor of the local liquor store. Not that he glamorises drinking, quite the reverse. Five of the stories here could be said to be about drink and drugs, but no one's having any fun with either. His depiction of alcoholism is so ghastly that it's almost medicinal—literary Antabuse. ‘Helping,’ the much anthologised anatomy of a marriage in the process of being destroyed by drink, could be a set text for recovering addicts. It is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without the melodrama; every step of the downward spiral is detailed, like a profane contemporary Stations of the Cross.

Stone has been compared to Raymond Carver (the late patron saint of American short stories, as V. S. Pritchett is ours), and their mutual preoccupation with drink and its fallout inevitably links the two. But Stone's vision is darker than Carver's, his settings are less suburban and his stories are very much longer. If Carver was a Scott Fitzgerald from the wrong side of the tracks, rueful, bittersweet, compassionate, Stone has something of the unrelenting machismo of Hemingway.

The Hemingway legacy is a mixed blessing. On the plus side are the lean elegance of the prose and the desperate valour the characters attempt when they find themselves—unwittingly and usually intoxicated—in boats and jeeps and gambling dens and bars, up a volcano in Mexico, or armed with a rifle in a forest of snow. On the minus side, though, are a surfeit of technical seafaring terminology (which mars only one story, admittedly) and the kind of macho talk which consists of such sentences as, ‘Hey, man, are you shittin' me?’ People in these pages say ‘whoa’ a lot. There are passages where the dialogue is almost too authentic: occasionally—where the characters have all been drinking, smoking dope and taking speed or cocaine—it becomes indecipherable.

But such flaws are very minor when set against Stone's considerable talent. It is rare to find so unflinching an observer of the seamier side of life, or such accuracy. The abrupt changes of mood and tempo which characterise insobriety—the alternate flashes of sourness and gaiety, the twitches of false insight and self-pity—have never been so vividly drawn as they are here. The title story and ‘Helping’ are both outstanding. They don't make comfortable reading, but then neither does Crime and Punishment. Sometimes reading fiction has less to do with pleasure than with discovering a truth; William Trevor has said that a successful story should be an explosion of truth. Love it or hate it, that is what Robert Stone offers.