In the following interview, Stone discusses the creation and characters of Outerbridge Reach, his approach to writing, his moral, political, and artistic concerns, American poetry, the formal education of writers, and the difficulty of the writing life.

In the following essay, Fredrickson examines Stone's presentation of cynical, disillusioned left-wing sympathizers and amoral leftist revolutionaries in his novels, particularly Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise.

In the following essay, Bloom discusses Stone's intertextual commentary on the uses and abuses of literary art in Outerbridge Reach, Children of Light, and A Flag for Sunrise. Bloom contends that Stone's fiction, like that of authors Thom Jones, Marilynne Robinson, and Don DeLillo, addresses the problematic legitimacy and interpretation of canonic writings and creative idols when appropriated by artists, critics, and filmmakers as a form of cultural capital.

In the following essay, Fredrickson examines Stone's religious preoccupations and spiritually bereft protagonists in Damascus Gate, as they represent a reprise and elaboration of Stone's theological speculations and portraits of alienated leftists in previous novels.

In the following excerpt, Bull discusses the political dimension of the novel form and examines the presence of ideological impasses in Stone's A Flag for Sunrise and Don DeLillo's Mao II, wherein crises of politics, religion, and morality are shown to have no apparent solutions.

In the following essay, Finn provides an overview of Stone's novels and examines the strengths and weaknesses of his writing style, social and political concerns, and underlying religious sentiment.

In the following essay, Karagueuzian notes ironic parallels between Dog Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, asserting that Stone underscores the inadequacy of Hemingway's moral and aesthetic vision by contrasting the nihilism and dissipation of Vietnam-era American drug-runners with Hemingway's expatriate Americans.

In the following essay, Packer provides an overview of Stone's novels, thematic concerns, and character types, noting that although Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach are weaker than his first three novels, Stone's visionary critique of American society remains underappreciated by a majority of critics.

In the following review, Edmundson contends that the reductive characters in Outerbridge Reach limit the depth and authenticity of the novel.

In the following essay, Shelton examines Stone's bleak evocation of moral disintegration and the demise of the American Dream in Dog Soldiers.

In the following review, Edwards provides an overview of Stone's fiction and offers a positive assessment of Bear and His Daughter.

In the following review, Halkin criticizes Stone's superficial understanding of Israel and Jewish religious nationalism in Damascus Gate.

In the following review, Wood faults Damascus Gate for being an amalgam of “techniques and conventions” aimed at maintaining simplicity, grouping Stone with a number of contemporary American realists preoccupied with this goal.

In the following review, Burn discusses the links between Stone and Tom Wolfe and criticizes Stone's uncredited use of a published account of the Donald Crowhurst story in Outerbridge Reach.

In the following review, Hower asserts that Stone employs a wide myriad of characters, settings, and motifs in a successful blending of the thriller genre and the spiritual quest in Damascus Gate.

In the following review, Quinn claims that Damascus Gate contains flat language, too many plots and characters, and fails in its aspirations as a thriller.

In the following review, Adams offers a positive assessment of Outerbridge Reach, calling the work a “strong, unhappy novel.”

In the following review, Gitlin argues that Damascus Gate is “overlong and overstuffed” with characters and subplots.

In the following excerpt, McGraw lauds Bear and His Daughter, contending that Stone writes concisely and powerfully in stories containing familiar themes from his novels such as morality and motivation.

In the following review, Wilentz compliments Stone's abilities as a writer but faults Bay of Souls for what she contends is a weak plot and a preoccupation with spirituality.

In the following interview, Stone discusses his past and the inspirations behind Bay of Souls.

In the following review, Eder commends the action, plot, and suspense in Damascus Gate but notes weaknesses in Stone's presentation of the novel's religious zealots.

In the following review, Garvey argues that Damascus Gate succeeds both as a thriller and as an examination of spirituality, extolling its use of such elements as dark humor, adventure, and the quest for truth.

Squalid, spectacular, agitated, littered with ancient ruins and riddled with more spies than you can shake a cloak at, Central America seems almost too much of a good thing for a novelist: the treasure of the Sierra Madre tarted up for an apocalypse. Robert Stone, setting his new, now novel in an imaginary but circumstantial version of this place, is taking a serious risk; but the risk is worth it, and the wager is won. We are "south of cliché" here, as a character in the book says. Sto...

In the following review, Gardner provides a favorable assessment of Damascus Gate but notes shortcomings in the novel's lackluster protagonist and stereotyped characters.

In the following review, Eder alternately praises and faults Outerbridge Reach, calling the writing “lucid and thrilling” in its passages about the sea but “bombastic” in its development of certain characters and events.

In the following review, Eder claims that the character and plot development in Bear and His Daughter is uneven and faults Stone for failing to compel readers to care about the protagonists.

In the following excerpt, Phillips argues that Outerbridge Reach is a successfully engaging narrative due to Stone's use of meticulous detail.

In the following review, Eder asserts that Children of Light suffers from overwritten characters, poor dialogue, and a plot that dissolves as the book progresses.

In the following review, Caldwell praises Outerbridge Reach, commending Stone's moral concerns but citing weaknesses in the novel's narrative structure.

In the following review, Meyers compares Children of Light to Kate Chopin's The Awakening but faults Stone's novel for lacking the “depth and power” of his earlier works such as Dog Soldiers.

In the following review, Sutherland criticizes Stone for failing to acknowledge his debt to the documented true story of ill-fated sailor Donald Crowhurst in Outerbridge Reach, upon which the novel is apparently based.

In the following excerpt, Pritchard praises the descriptive passages and dark humor in Bear and His Daughter, contending that Stone is a competent short story writer but that his abilities are more suited to longer narratives.

In the following review, Miller praises Bear and His Daughter, asserting that Stone is a careful, polished writer who deserves to be read.

In the following review, Hynes contends that Damascus Gate is ambitious, powerful, and “Dickensian” in its scope.

In the following review, Saunders offers praise for both Stone's ability to tie up loose plot threads in Damascus Gate and for clearly delineating a large cast of characters in a political thriller.

In the following review, King extols the passages concerning the high-seas adventure in Outerbridge Reach and commends the “noble and grand scale” of the novel.

[Almost] any human movement in Stone's novels becomes, whether this is intended or not, a metaphor for intrusion or intervention, and of the suffering that follows from it. Drugs or alcohol are in that sense also intrusive, a self-inflicted assault on the mind. (p. 37) A Flag for Sunrise offers anything that can send a body up or down—acid for the hippies, dexies for Pablo, and, for the older folk, lots and lots of booze and grass.

In the following review, Connolly offers a positive assessment of Bear and His Daughter, noting the critical trend to compare Stone's writing to that of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.

[A Hall of Mirrors] provides a profound and disquieting vision of contemporary American society and possible responses to that society. A measure of the artistic success of the novel is the fact that Stone's themes inhere in every aspect of the novel. Recurring images and metaphors, for example, develop the main themes and provide a convenient way to examine and classify the chief characters. Many writers, Hawthorne and Camus among others, have warned of the dangers of detachment, the sin of isolatio...

It is almost impertinent to say that the 30-year-old author of this first novel has talent, and it is impertinent to try and relate his gifts to his age or publishing history. Stone, at this moment, is a remarkable writer. "A Hall of Mirrors" is, one could say, "The Day of the Locust" as told to Malcolm Lowry and edited by Frantz Fanon, the shade of the young Dos Passos benignly gazing on the while. And with such namedropping I mean less to imply influences—which in any ca...

In the following review, Danziger criticizes Children of Light, asserting that the novel is filled with disturbing, greedy characters and a grim and depressing plot.

In the following review, Hulse criticizes Damascus Gate, claiming that Stone fails to “come to terms” with his religious subject matter in the novel and that the narrative is unconvincing.

A Flag for Sunrise is about Catholics—a nun, a priest, an anthropologist, a drifter—caught up among spies, gun runners, murderers, maniacs, and revolutionaries in a poor Central American country ruled by American business interests and the CIA through a local military regime. The plot is complicated and built upon short scenes, some of them so intensely dramatic they could be published independently. What holds them together is suspenseful action, an atmosphere of neurasthenic menace, and Ston...

The extraordinary richness of [A Hall of Mirrors] lies not so much in the plot as in the wonderfully drawn secondary characters, all on the margin of society and mostly on the outer edge of sanity. This gallery of grotesques does not strike the reader as being made up of arbitrary creations of a bookish imagination. They are social and psychological types that tell us a great deal about the real world of America. The crowning achievement is the character of Geraldine, ignorant, not pretty, and not smart, bu...

A Flag for Sunrise is too long and badly paced. In part, this arises from the understandable difficulties of inventing and populating a foreign land. Less excusable, however, is the constant intrusion of the author's "ideas," which bloat the narrative and slow the book's pace. There are too many "flags" here, too many gaudy symbols and concepts run up the pole, trumpets blaring, by an author hell-bent on being taken seriously. In particular, the bogus, boozy philoso...

Robert Stone has published only three novels in 14 years, but they have established him as one of the most interesting and gifted novelists in America. He is also slightly out of the run of current American fiction by seeming not to share his colleagues' fascination with their own egos. Even in his first book, 'A Hall of Mirrors,' which was intermittently brilliant but hectic and florid, as though its anguish and distaste were more than he was yet equipped to handle, he seemed above all...

Stone's characters wear their emblematic responsibilities so naturally that A Flag for Sunrise works as an adventure yarn, but on the level at which it aspires to greatness, the book is about the process by which ideas—theologies, ideologies—flesh themselves out and become institutions, and about how they are damaged in transit. This layering should come as no surprise to readers familiar with Stone's stunning Dog Soldiers …; what is unexpected, however, is the anachronous...

Robert Stone's [A Flag for Sunrise] is sweeping and ambitious. It deals with major political and social themes; it is set in a small, backward, near-mythic Central American country; it has a large, diverse cast of characters whose fates draw them inexorably to the same place at the same moment; it invites comparison, according to promotional material, with For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Naked and the Dead. Since both those novels are vastly overrated, the comparison is apt. Notwithstanding all the b...

In the following review, Saari contends that Stone is a “writer of rare power” who successfully examines the darker side of human nature in works such as Outerbridge Reach.

In the following review, the critic calls Bay of Souls “a small masterpiece,” contending that the novel is spare, intense, and clear.

Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, made into a successful film, dealt with what his publishers termed 'post Vietnam trauma'; and although A Flag for Sunrise is largely set in a fictitious Central American state, called Tecan, it also does so—albeit obliquely…. When critics have written of this novelist, they have tended to evoke Graham Greene and Conrad. Like Greene, Stone is an exponent of the thriller as parable; but, unlike Greene, he fails to ensure that his thrillers still ...

On the jacket of Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors, Wallace Stegner says that Stone "writes like a bird, like an angel"—which is not at all true; what is true is that Stone writes very well, that he creates a group of characters that are credible and some caricatures that are interesting, and that he places them in an action that is appropriate to their abilities and significant to our society. In doing all this, Stone has accomplished a great deal. The story Stone tells is comparat...

[A] first novel about which I am most enthusiastic is Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors, which would be notable in any season and whether it was the author's first or his tenth…. Stone has written about a number of persons who are badly adjusted to the society in which they find themselves. (p. 24)