Rarely do verbal precision, intelligence, imagination, and compassion converge to produce a talent as awesome as William Trevor's. His eleventh offering to a burgeoning and increasingly enthusiastic American audience further entitles aspiring writers of fiction to despise him a little.

Other People's Worlds, with the persuasive intricacy characteristic of Mr. Trevor's short stories, reveals the presence of the demonic in human affairs as most ordinary human beings encounter it…. The despicable Tyte is one of the byzantine monsters in western literature; his adventures, only gradually discovered by Julia, have left the wake of his careening will strewn with human debris….

As Tyte's rapine, so sedulously depicted by Mr. Trevor, propels the narrative toward excruciatingly predictable horror, it becomes apparent that the Devil which here concerns Mrs. Ferndale, Mr. Tyte, and other victims, is not the dramatic and obvious steward of hydrogen bombs, terrorism, and concentration camps. This is...