BOOK REVIEW : A String of Short Stories Explores Rifts Between Families and Friends : THIEF OF LIVES <i> by Kit Reed</i> ; University of Missouri Press; $19.95; 179 pages

There are two Kit Reeds, the briskly efficient plotter who wrote the taut suspense novel “Gone” under the name of Kit Craig and her alter ego, the pensive author of “Thief of Lives,” 15 tales of anguished accommodation to circumstances defying control.

One way and another, both the recent thriller and the short stories deal with loss and the various ways we struggle to cope with guilt, despair and the chasms that separate families and friends. The preoccupation is consistent, although the methods and results are entirely different.

In “Gone,” a loving mother mysteriously vanishes and is eventually found by her resourceful and determined children. In “Thief of Lives,” the losses are subtler and the even the more successful searches often end inconclusively.

The collection opens with “In the Squallus,” a sensitive voyage into the heart and mind of a naval officer who survived the submarine disaster that drowned his shipmates. Caught in a safe, watertight compartment of the ship as water flooded the engine room, Larkin and a few other fortunate men are rescued.

Although he continues his naval career, he’s haunted for a lifetime by memories of the dead. When the nightmares overwhelm him, his wife reminds him that there was nothing he or anyone else could have done, but still Larkin feels he should have opened the door and perished with the rest. When personal tragedy strikes, he virtually embraces it, convinced that “it is the function of all the living to redeem the dead.”

In a somewhat less mournful mode, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” explores the reactions of a young man visiting his father. When Jerome was a small boy, his father left the family to join a remote religious commune founded to survive Armageddon. In the intervening years, as the idea of Armageddon has become more complex, the commune has degenerated into a ramshackle encampment of listing trailers and fading ideals.

Although many of the original members have decamped, Jerome finds his father cheerfully splitting logs, proud of the elaborate underground shelters and surprisingly pragmatic. “Whatever it is, whatever threatens us . . . you might as well boil it all down to something you can prepare for.”

“Winter” is as succinct and bleak as its title. Two aging and bitter sisters harbor a young vagrant who briefly brightens their lives before he betrays them. In return, they exact a brutal revenge.

“Fourth of July” probes the emotions of a wife who married into an uncongenial family of domineering women, but here, in one of the few epiphanies in the collection, the story ends with a delayed but precious connection finally established.

A middle-aged priest who fell in love and married the nun who worked with him on a community project, “Clement” guiltily and secretly longs for the order and serenity of his prior life. Conditioned by his years in the priesthood, he envies the ease and naturalness of his wife’s adjustment to domesticity but finds himself constitutionally unable to revel in the chaos of secular fatherhood.

In “Queen of the Beach,” the adult child who visits an aging parent is a daughter, separated from her mother by taste, ambition, personality and values as well as by geographical distance.

“When we meet, we fuse, locked in the terrible ancient pattern, mother and daughter, gog and magog, yang and yin, or is it Chang and Eng?” The seaside Florida town to which this mother has fled is but another version of the doomsday commune in “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the distance between parent and child equally vast.

“Academic Novel” is a series of vignettes following the fortunes of a university community through the years. Ironically meditative, the terse paragraphs show the once tightknit group in the process of change, accident and dissolution. The perspective is dispassionate--”We who are on the scene but outside the sequence look at our mingled lives and try to discern a pattern.”

As do the title story and the majority of the others, “Academic Novel” encompasses the author’s central preoccupations. Here as elsewhere in this cohesive collection, the characters confront life’s inevitabilities with varying combinations of grace, despair, resignation, courage and humor.