Watchers in an Unquiet Country : NEBRASKA : Stories <i> by Ron Hansen (Atlantic Monthly Press: $16.95; 216 pp.)</i> : THE WATCH : Stories <i> by Rick Bass (W.W. Norton: $16.95; 191 pp.) </i>

Lately, many writers of the short story have stood accused of a homogenized “minimalism,” the result of a constricting fashion acquired in writers’ workshops at colleges and universities. Regardless of the questionable merit of such charges, these two first collections provide ample evidence that, in the hands of Hansen and Bass, the short story is alive and well, and anything but minimal.

Hansen is the author of two novels, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and the widely acclaimed “Desperadoes.” Both books display Hansen’s talent for evoking the landscapes of the Midwest and re-creating the descriptive tone and dialogue of times past with a keen ear for authenticity.

It is not surprising, therefore, that his best stories in “Nebraska” reveal the same strengths. In “Wickedness,” Hansen’s narrative cinematically pans the landscape of small-town Nebraska as the tornadolike blizzard of 1888 sweeps across it, killing livestock and people. His details are at once brutally realistic and metaphorically suggestive. The storm takes on a character all its own as it cuts across the landscape with the infinite fury of an angry Old Testament God: “Cats died, dogs died, pigeons died. Entire farms of cattle and pigs and geese and chickens were wiped out in a single night. Horizontal snow that was hard and dry as salt dashed and seethed over everything, sloped up like rooftops, trickled its way across creek beds and ditches, milkily purled down city streets, stole shanties and coops and pens from a bleak landscape that was even then called the Great American Desert.”

In “Playland,” Hansen first reveals the machinery behind the creation of an absurdly grandiose Nebraska amusement park before focusing on the triangular tensions among two men and a woman who visit there, creating the glib banter of the 1940s and evoking the eerie magic of the place by the story’s abrupt end. The title story is a panoramic prose poem invoking the rolling land of Nebraska and its small towns with names of “Americus, Covenant, Denmark, Grange, Hooray, Jerusalem, Sweetwater,” where “high importance is only attached to practicalities, and so there is the Batchelor Funeral Home, where a proud old gentleman is on display in a dark brown suit, his yellow fingernails finally clean, his smeared eyeglasses in his coat pocket, a grandchild on tiptoes by the casket, peering at the lips that will not move, the sparrow chest that will not rise.”

Hansen’s collection also displays his talent in a wide range of story styles. In “The Killers,” he provides a literary payback to the two thugs of Hemingway’s story. “Sleepless” is a tale of supernatural terror reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s better work. In “Red Letter Days,” a 70-year-old man’s diary entries record his love of golf (which becomes a love of living), his struggle to resist drinking, and his vigil as a companion to an ailing wife and as a citizen of a town in which his friends are dead or dying. “True Romance,” one of the most remarkable stories in the collection, can be read on several levels--as a farm wife’s first-person narrative about a monster killing cattle, as a parody of romance magazine narratives, and, I believe, as a tale whose central action becomes a metaphor for the pain suffered in wounded love and for the sacrifices necessary to rekindle that love.

“Nebraska” is a diversified collection of fictions, some of which seem more like richly detailed sketches than stories. Hansen can make the land, a storm or an amusement park more of a main character than the people in these fictions. But this isn’t to suggest that his fictional people are any less cogently imagined. With an eye for those details that authentically re-create a past era or establish the beauty and isolation of the Nebraska landscape, and an ear for the idiom of ordinary conversation--whether in the far past, the near past or the present--Hansen at his best enables us to believe that beyond the quiet beauty of the commonplace are worlds of infinite variation, more mysterious and sometimes more threatening than our daily routines permit us to sense except through fiction.

Rick Bass’ debut work of fiction, “The Watch,” is a collection of stories notable in their oddly beautiful description of characters struggling with loneliness, loss, and diminished expectations. Bass, a petroleum geologist rather than a workshop refugee, has already published two books of nonfiction, and attracted wide attention as a story writer. He received the 1987 General Electric Younger Writers Award for “Wild Horses” and his “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses” appears in “Best American Stories 1988.” “The Watch” was anthologized in “New Stories from the South 1988.” These three stories stand out from the collection--the first two by virtue of the control Bass maintains in creating characters who overcome the loss of loved ones or a sudden awareness of limitations without giving in to despair; the third, by far the longest, by virtue of its Gothic quirkiness as it depicts the tensions among an aging father, a son 14 years his junior, and an overweight cyclist transfixed by the son.

These are stories, as with Hansen’s, in which landscape, most often in the South, figures importantly--it is larger and more powerful than the characters who own or use it, and their interactions with the land and its animals often take Bass’ fiction beyond the confines of ordinary existence.

Three of the stories in this collection are set in Texas, and of these, “Mexico” best conveys the vision Bass has of Houston as an oil boom-and-bust wasteland. In describing a stag party stunt, the unnamed first-person narrator states: “Mostly it’s just drinking. Driving cars into each other, head-on . . . on empty lamplit Main Street: the gold light coming down past the oaks, twinkling, like haze at a football stadium. The crunch and tear of metal, the tinkle of glass, the laughs and the cheers. Seeing who can make the biggest noise.” The art of Bass’ writing is found in a passage like this, in which an incident becomes emblematic of the whole. Although the story drifts into a situation all too reminiscent of “The Sun Also Rises,” its evocation of excessive wealth and individual impotence layered over a swampy, sweltering landscape makes it the best of Bass’ triad of Houston stories.

In “Wild Horses,” a man who sat still as his best friend jumped to his death off a high bridge forms a sadomasochistic relationship with the dead friend’s fiance. Their mutual efforts to assuage their suffering and guilt lead them to steal a yearling black Angus and throw it off the same bridge. It is a story in which suffering and beauty are artfully melded without ever suggesting a simple resolution to the tragedy experienced by its two main characters.

In “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses,” the narrator states: “In the noble West, where I used to live before I reached puberty, it was manly and virtuous not to tell people about yourself. . . . But not in Mississippi. In the South, you were supposed to tell them. They held it against you if you didn’t, because it meant you were trying to hide something.”

This passage suggests competing aesthetic credos for Rick Bass--and the tensions in his work could be seen as the result of attempting to resolve the difference between these two styles of presentation. Bass’ narrators most often are first person, and to the extent he can maintain the verve and jazz of Barry Hannah’s narrators, as in “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses,” he succeeds as Hannah does. There is an explosive, unconventional syntax to the voice of such narrators that spawns descriptions of great beauty and propels the story onward with delightful unpredictability. But it’s a high-risk narrative strategy that does occasionally send his stories swerving into sentimentality. When Bass adopts the Western mode of presentation, as he does--despite the story’s setting--in “Wild Horses,” narrated in a limited third person through the two principal characters, he succeeds again, unforgettably. In either style, Bass has the power to create fictions that reverberate long after they have been read.

These two collections offer those who would bemoan the state of contemporary fiction ample evidence that the story is not limited to a municipality composed of the living room and backyard. And for those who never found merit in such claims in the first place, they provide yet another affirmation of the versatility and strength of current short fiction.