Excerpt from Bay of Souls by Robert Stone, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I think we turned a corner," she said. "Michael! Kristin! I think we turned a corner."

Then the doctor entered quietly and they got Kristin into bed and she went under the medication. Even unconscious, her eyes were half open.

The doctor said you responded or you didn’t, and Paul had responded. His temperature was going up. He was coming up. He would even get his fingers and toes back and his ethical little Christian brain going, it appeared. The doctor looked so relieved.

"You can have a minute while we get the gurney. We’ve gotta get her x-rayed pronto because she’s got a broken leg there."

"You can see Paul," the nurse said. "He’s sleeping. Real sleep now."

The doctor laughed. "It’s very exhausting to half freeze to death."

"It would be," Michael said.

While they got the gurney, he looked into Kristin’s half-open, tortured, long-lashed blue eyes and brushed the slightly graying black hair from them. With her long face and buck teeth she looked like the Christus on a Viking crucifix. Given her, he thought, given me, why didn’t he die? Maybe he still will, Michael thought. The notion terrified him. He had stood up to make his escape when the orderlies came in to take Kristin away. Michael rubbed her cold hand.

The chapel was down at the end of the corridor. It had a kind of altar, stained-glass windows that opened on nothing, that were inlaid with clouds and doves and other fine inspirational things.

Michael had been afraid, for a while, that there was something out there, at the beginning and end of consciousness. An alpha and an omega to things. He had believed it for years on and off. And that night, he had felt certain, the fire would be visited on him. His boy would be taken away and he would know, know absolutely, the power of the most high. Its horrible providence. Its mysteries, its hide-and-seek, and lessons, and redefined top-secret mercies to be understood through prayer and meditation. But only at really special moments of rhapsody and ecstasy and O, wondrous clarity.

Behold now behemoth. Who can draw Leviathan? Et cetera.

But now his son’s life was saved. And the great thing had come of nothing, of absolutely nothing, out of a kaleidoscope, out of a Cracker Jack box. Every day its own flower, to every day its own stink and savor. Good old random singularity and you could exercise a proper revulsion for life’s rank overabundance and everybody could have their rights and be happy.

And he could be a serious person, a grownup at last, and not worry over things that educated people had not troubled themselves with practically for centuries. Free at last and it didn’t mean a thing and it would all be over, some things sooner than later. His marriage, for one, sealed in faith like the Sepulchral stone. Vain now. No one watched over us. Or rather we watched over each other. That was providence, what a relief. He turned his back on the inspirations of the chapel and went out to watch his lovely son survive another day.

Copyright © 2003 by Robert Stone. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.