[In the following review, Gold praises the stories in Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.]

This is a collection of stories about coming of age in Chicago. Stuart Dybek's title struck me as a trifle coy, until I had finished the book. By then Childhood and Other Neighborhoods had come to seem as apt as any of the startling observations and sharp images that distinguish these 11 tales of growing up poor and American and urban in the middle decades of the 20th century. Mr. Dybek grounds his stories in the city's streets and alleys, in the feel his young children and adolescents have for the neighborhood landscapes of their early years, and then bends his flair for naturalism on an anvil of fantasy, with bizarre results that yet seem utterly consistent with the logic of childhood.

In "Blood Soup," 13-year-old Steve sets out to find duck's blood, the primary ingredient in a soup his ailing grandmother believes will keep her alive. Equipped with the jar that had contained her holy water, Steve picks up his younger brother, Dove, and together they begin an odyssey that takes them to rooftops, to a lagoon in the black section of the city, to an abandoned tenement listing over the elevated railway. There they locate Pan Gowumpe, a raucous old man surrounded by fowl, who finally, after some frightening, funny exchanges with the pair, appears to give them what they came for. They flee, evading the addled black man who had led them there (while sure he is in hot pursuit), and when Steve discovers that they are not carrying duck's blood at all, the story ends.

In the ultra-strange "Visions of Budhardin," a man who in his youth had been in the habit of luring his friends into acts of mortal sin and has now returned to the old neighborhood to make amends, sits at the controls of a mechanical elephant in an overgrown lot. Roaming the neighborhood inside his elephant, he ends up wrecking a church with a nun astride his back trying to bring him down, and escapes on a garbage scow with one of the new generation of altar boys.

The young man in "The Apprentice" is not sure how he has come to be gathering roadside detritus for a living, in the company of paranoid old "Uncle" ("Who are our enemies, Uncle?" "Who? The same as those of all peoples. The secret police. The KGB of the soul, CIA of the brain, SS who think they are only harmless dogcatchers…. KKK, FBI, ICBM, DDT, initials! Initials are our enemies, Tadeusz"), nor just why it is that he winds up clinging to the top of an opening drawbridge, gathering pigeon eggs.

The old neighborhood changes, and so do we. The more straightforward stories—"Charity," "The Long Thoughts," "Sauerkraut Soup"—painfully document these changes and are full of riches. This is an impressive debut in short fiction.