THE WOMAN LIT BY FIREFLIES

Three novellas from Harrison (Dalva, Sundog, Warlock, etc.) that are replete with his trademarks--a sure-handed sense of place and a sensibility that tends toward violence and macho chic. All three use extended flashbacks and emphasize the healing power of nature and the importance of loyalty. ""Sunset Limited"" focuses on Gwen, a 41-year-old woman with a radical past. When Zip, a cockamamie radical who still spouts rhetoric about ""running dogs,"" is arrested in Mexico, she contacts her old group (a ""pacifist Wild Bunch"" arrested at a draft board in 1968): Billy, a big-time California yuppie who hides his egalitarianism from his fascist father; Patricia, once in prison, now wealthy and ""too busy to be in love""; and Sam, a natural man (and thus the novella's wisdom figure). They all go to Mexico and try to get Zip (""The Last Radical"") free. After a good deal of legal maneuvering, everyone except Billy escapes with Zip; Billy gets killed protecting the rest in a bizarre, apocalyptic finish. ""Brown Dog,"" a lively throwaway, is the comic memoir of B.D., a carouser. Besides the usual drinking/screwing-around stories, B.D. finds a dead Indian chief, still well-preserved, on the bottom of Lake Superior and has an apotheosis of sorts when the dead chief ""speaks"" to him in the back of an ice truck. The chief, of course, tells B.D. to be more natural and earthy. In the title story, likewise, Clare--a bookish, frail woman given to migraines--discovers herself when she's forced to survive on her own in the outdoors. By story's end, she has decided to leave her husband, a thinly sketched anti-Semite addicted to his ""daily broker call."" The sense of landscape is powerful in all of these, but many of the minor characters are only slightly drawn.