Stones

Edgar Award winner Findley's ( The Telling of Lies ) short stories leap from one crucial and vivid glimpse to another, building tension almost to the level of a Hitchcock movie, yet the author is also adept at a slower and more linear narrative style. The center of emotional gravity in the Toronto that Findley, a native, depicts is the Mental Health Centre on Queen Street. Its wards and its patients fascinate these protagonists, and the meaning of their lives grows out of their relationship to sanity and insanity. A number of characters experience what one narrator calls ``psychotic withdrawal,'' and several are psychiatrists or social workers. But Findley refuses to give psychology and its reasonable explanations the last word: instead, madness shares an unmarked border with passion and creativity; although failures to distinguish dream from reality can prove dangerous, Findley implies, forever separating the two can be deadening. The nine tales here explore similar situations from varied points of view, ultimately yielding a richly satisfying range of perspectives. (Feb.)