Admirers of those two earlier novels will want to read Mr. Boyd's short stories. It is like stepping into the author's laboratory. They are mostly early experimental work, tryings out of theme and technique. But except in two postmodernist trifles, ''Bizarre Situations'' and ''Long Story Short,'' the experimenting is not a disadvantage. My Girl in Skintight Jeans'' are brief sketches of lost lonely young men.
Real violence appears in ''Love Hurts,'' a lurid tale of jealousy and murder.
Much more ambitious is the title story, ''On the Yankee Station,'' in which Lydecker, a feeble, bullied aircraft mechanic who has seen the terrible napalm scars on a young prostitute's back in Saigon, works his violent revenge on a napalm- happy Navy pilot. The story has good intentions and is vividly told, but the horrors here seem too programmatic. In two initiation stories, Mr. Boyd's characteristic shift from brutality to gentleness within a character's psyche works through the contrasts he develops between youth's lewd sexual imaginings and the curious delicacies of actual encounter. In ''Hardly Ever,'' Niles, a senior boy in a Scottish public school, joins his sex-starved classmates in a production of ''H.M.S. Pinafore,'' which they hope will afford opportunities with local high school girls. He finds a strangely attractive but fastidious partner and, surrounded by sexual braggarts, he is driven to invent lustful coups for his excited dormitory.