(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 195 pages; $24) Reviewed by Alan Cheuse San Francisco Chronicle, Copyright 2010 When you start to add up the people who meet their fate by drowning in the stories and novels of Robert Stone, the toll quickly mounts. A pair of drug smugglers who take a swim while their boat drifts in the Caribbean and discover they can't climb back on board in the great story 'Under the Pitons,' the implicit mid-ocean demise of the protagonist in Stone's masterly novel 'Outerbridge Reach,' the near-miss in a dive toward horror in the novel 'Bay of Souls.' In 'Fun With Problems,' Stone's intense and finely carved new story collection, there are more. A drowning to begin -- and end -- a Caribbean honeymoon, an implied death in a fancy outdoor pool way out in the Western mountain wilderness and, my God, enough metaphorical drownings in booze, drink by drink, to fill a pool itself, if not an ocean. The boozing begins in the title story as Peter Matthews, 'an aging attorney with the public defender's office' in rural Massachusetts, arrives at a county lockup to visit a wretched young client who has been threatened with mayhem by a fellow inmate. If Matthews had his own firm, it could have been called Darker and Darker. When he meets a former off-off-Broadway actress, now a psychologist who's working with the offending prison bully, he quickly engages her in a liaison built on drink that takes them both down into newfound depths. The story 'Honeymoon,' which in the hands of most other writers would simply seem a gimmick, stands as a masterwork of concision. In 'High Wire,' the story of an addiction-dependent romance between a Hollywood writer and an actress on the edge of success, drugs take the place of alcohol. Boozing is back in 'The Archer,' the final story in the collection, in which a vexed academic lecturer flies south to a Persian Gulf state university to give a talk, making a little descent of his own into mania and outrage. Down down down down down! Why go there? We follow Stone's characters all the way to the bottom because of the stark and marvelous skeins of sentences that carry us in these descents, sentences made of language as sharp and compelling as Stone's dramatic insights into the painful interior states of his characters. In that gulf state in the final story, for example, the tap water in the main character's hotel room tastes, we hear, 'of baitfish and the Confederate dead,' while outside 'a swollen country fatboy of a sun' is 'sliding under soupy ripples into the Gulf.' In 'From the Lowlands,' the story about the man who meets his worst nightmare in the swimming pool of his lavish Western mountain second home, we observe the view with Leroy, a nearly affectless Silicon Valley mogul, as he watches it from its perimeter. It leads his eye -- and ours -- in a certain familiar direction: 'His mountain property had two levels, both of them set well back from the river so he could assure himself that he was not like the reckless householders downstream. Some of them had balanced themselves on picturesque but heart-stopping outcrops, where they could crawl to the edge of their decks and look down over the rim into swirling white water. Leroy never failed to see, in his imagination, their terrifying fall into the canyon, houses and Franklin stoves and heritage tomatoes and trophy wives in a fatal descending whirl.' Alas for Leroy, he can't see his own fatal descending whirl. The reader can. Even as things turn darker and darker, Stone illuminates his stories by the steady black light of his tragic sense of life, employing the best possible sentences for the job. Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for National Public Radio. 