RaveThe Washington PostMadison Smartt Bell captures every aspect of Stone’s contradictory nature, especially his work ethic ... One of the best sections of this praiseworthy biography is the account of a trip he took with Stone to Haiti, along with one of Stone’s mistresses, who had to nursemaid the novelist when it appeared that he might die while traveling to a voodoo ritual ... Yet sympathetic as he is to his subject, Bell never softens his focus or smooths over Stone’s less admirable traits ... Bell has a novelist’s gimlet eye for details, and the Stone archive offered him rich material. It revealed as much about the state of publishing in the 21st century as it did about Stone ... While I wish there had been more about Stone’s early life, the daughter he fathered outside his marriage and the sexual partners who clearly influenced his fiction, Bell does a laudable job of explicating Stone’s novels ... In the end, Child of Light leaves the reader with the urge to return to all of Robert Stone’s work—surely the best sign of a fine biography.
