MixedHarpersThis is what Stewart’s work conveys at its best: a sense of humility and an appreciation of the contingent status of our own species, endlessly threatened as it is by a relentless, hostile nature. ... Storm is decidedly uninterested in the humans that populate its pages, treating their lives superficially, or with a lack of empathetic identification that sometimes approaches cruelty ... Stranger, less human subplots also appear, told in episodic vignettes ... wildly complicated and bizarre ... Storm is a dense web of accidents, a vast orchestral work in which each moving part bespeaks an organic relationship to the whole. It seems to violate every sense of what a novel ought to be, where its interest ought to lie. It doesn’t read as though written by a misanthrope, per se, but by someone to whom humans, animals, and the elements of inanimate nature were so many microscopic organisms colliding in a petri dish ... Storm makes explicit what Stewart had more gently suggested in Ordeal by Hunger: that the world is fundamentally mankind’s antagonist, and that the best we can manage in this struggle is a fragile truce.
