Books: Shrunken-Head Faulkner

No PLACE TO RUN '(280 pp.)—Philip Alston Stone—Viking ($3.75).

Harvard Freshman Philip Alston Stone, 18, wrote this fictional portrait of a Southern demagogue last year when he was still in prep school (Hotchkiss). No male Sagan, Novelist Stone is a chip off the writing desk occupied by William Faulkner, his famed fellow townsman in Oxford, Miss. In his rhetoric, country humor and nightmare vision of social change and violence. Novelist Stone resembles Faulkner, much as a shrunken head resembles a life-sized one.

The hero of No Place to Run is a kind of composite of the Southern political rabble-rouser with glints of Bilbo...