Wild Things

Clegg (The Machinery of Night ) shows how the bestial aspects of horror and humanity are interchangeable in this quartet of psychological suspense stories. "A Madness of Starlings" concerns a man who looks to nature for reassurance of his fatherly instincts only to find his dislocating feelings of angst and alienation mirrored instead. In "The Dark Game," an American soldier turns tables on his captors in Vietnam with the help of an especially brutal survival trick involving self-hypnosis. "The American" is a spare, Hemingwayesque tale of threatened manhood with an Alfred Hitchcock twist. "The Wolf" tells of a hunting expedition in which the roles of predator and prey are craftily reversed. Though several stories stretch the theme of this volume, each makes riveting reading. (Nov.)