CRYSTAL RIVER

Three novellas from Southern stylist Smith (The Lives of the Dead, Shine Hawk), whose palmetto-fringed tales of northern Florida's Gulf Coast are inhabited by twisted families and grim relationships tinged with madness. Redolent with Faulknerian fragrances, ``Storyville'' plunges two despairing people—a drunken small-town lawyer and the mysterious woman whose estate he's trying to unravel—into a search for his long-vanished father and her lost child, a tale that recounts her pregnancy and isolation at 14 after being raped by her father. ``Tinian'' proposes another fantastic search, as the members of a family pursue each other to the South Seas, one fleeing her husband's cruelty and sick manipulations—only to be followed there by him, his mother, and finally by his brother—and finding that his mother has become a stripper and that relations between the other two have resumed a murderous tension. ``Crystal River'' builds to a similarly bleak prospect as two men decide to drift downriver in their canoe in winter, discovering a shotgun- toting, cruel woman en route who leads them from adventure to robbery and violence before leaving them to face the consequences alone. Hard-edged and harrowing, each story studies sex and sanity with a clinical eye, paring marriages, families, and chance encounters alike down to a common astringent essence. Vividly focused on life beyond the pale of respectability, these are brash but repetitive, stuck in a quirky groove involving absent partners and desperate liaisons.