Taking Vengeance for Her Sadness : CRYSTAL RIVER, <i> By Charlie Smith (Linden Press</i> :<i> $20</i> ;<i> 271 pp.)</i>

“Crystal River” presents a stunning trio of tales. Read separately, each novella resonates with richness and clarity; together, they offer a profound and disturbing view of characters wedged inside the contemporary South.

In the first piece, “Storyville,” a drunken small-town lawyer thrown overboard by cronies wades ashore from the Florida surf, only to encounter a woman at sea inside herself.

The woman, Laura, has lost her baby and her husband--he committed suicide--and she has now returned to her birthplace “to seek . . . a life I do not explain to others.”

The lawyer, Harry, has lost his family as well: His wife divorced him, his father disappeared and his mother died looking for him. Harry has drenched himself in alcohol, “the drunkard’s alchemy: acid that turns to ease.”

These two people are drawn together as only the terminally lonely can be. Desperate for a dream, they decide to steal a boat and go in search of Harry’s missing father.

When Harry later questions their hapless journey, Laura responds, “What does it matter . . . we’re not within range of anyone’s judgment. Even our own.”

Two wounded people try to wrap themselves in the bandage of each other’s bodies . . . but memory seeps through.

On a boat stolen from Harry’s twin brother, they go in search of what neither believes will be found--but the search will delay the arrival of what they both already know: There is no escape from the event in their respective pasts that dooms them in the present.

“It isn’t loneliness that makes us less than human,” Harry realizes. “It’s abandonment.”

Finally, in New Orleans, Laura crosses over; she breaks into a house to take another woman’s baby.

Harry wrestles her away and they return to the sea. One night, they lower themselves into the water, and, holding the bowline, are dragged through the darkness “like trolled human bait.” Laura finally lets go.

Harry will return to the inlet of his life and rejoin his aging twin “in the frail but enduring simulacrum, human love.”

The second novella, “Crystal River,” recounts another lost voyage. Jack and Harold are not so much bisexuals as old friends who “played” with each other as teen-agers and have never stopped. Now bruised and numbed by life, they have decided to get away from it all with a voyage down-river in a stolen canoe.

They fail to realize that what they are fleeing from is waiting around the next bend: A naked woman appears, arms stretched over her head.

Disappearing inside a tent, the woman returns with a shotgun. Brandishing it at the two friends, she orders them ashore--to make love with her.

Afterward, snow falls as the woman dresses and joins the men on their bateau ivre.

As the mysterious stranger, Arlene, begins to exert her force, she shows that a man’s despair and self-pity are no match for a woman taking vengeance for her own sadness. When the group encounters two couples at a camp site, Arlene pumps birdshot into their canoes.

Finally, the trio is confronted by a park ranger. Arlene gets the drop on him, takes his truck and drives away, leaving the two friends marooned.

So Charlie Smith turns the formula upside down: Instead of the brute discarding the female, one woman takes two men on a journey down her private River Styx--then dumps them on a far shore of hell.

In the longest novella, “Tinian,” a matriarchal north Florida family tries to escape a curse, only to fulfill it thousands of miles away on a Pacific island.

The mother says her dead husband, a suicide, visits every night. Effie, the older son, sees the world through Zen-tinted lens. His younger brother, Paul, suspects his family is “simply crazy, off in the country too long. The repetitiousness and isolation of country life had simply gotten to them.”

Effie announces he is going off to the island of Tinian to find the last Japanese soldier holding out in the jungle. Paul, however, knows his brother is really going to find his wife Helen, who ran off to the South Pacific.

When the mother follows Effie, Paul is left behind. He begins to suspect that “the world was simply a place that repeated itself to you over and over like a song you were supposed to memorize, until you got the lesson right.” He finally goes to join his family.

Arriving on Tinian, Paul discovers his mother performing strip-tease for soldiers on a nearby island. His brother is praying to abandoned airstrips where the B-29s took off to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan. And Helen is hiding on the other side of the island.

It can all end only in violence. “I have never understood anyone’s dream,” Paul thinks, returning home after a tragic turn of events. Having literally followed the fantasies of his brother, mother and sister-in-law, Paul can now live his own life-dream.

What links these powerful novellas is the landscape from which they were extracted: the rural South--grim, overgrown, dank, swaddled with memory and a nostalgia so corrosive that it eats through the present, leaving a vast, great hole.