THE ROAD TO BOBBY JOE AND OTHER STORIES "PEOPLE IN EXTREME SITUATIONS OR AT THE BREAKING POINT." An ancient black escape artist; a Laotian busboy, driven to violence in a swank New Orleans restaurant; an American Indian youth who tries to win his beloved's hand by working overtime at a slaughterhouse; an Italian soprano whose compulsive eating leads to the brink of an operatic suicide. These are but four of the singular characters who inhabit the exotic yet inescapably familiar fictional world of Louis Berney, whose first collection of stories this is. Berney is basically working with ordinary people, caught up in circumstances that cause them to act in often extraordinary ways. What they do may be startling, but it does not fail to be, quixotically, an expression of their humanness. If the real world does't suit, there is a dream world just beyond that may - or may not - provide an out. But the human spirit will prevail, and the author's skill lies in his evocation of that dizzy single - mindedness, that refusal to cry uncle, that keeps all of stumbling along our rock-strewn paths.