Roadside picnic sees Earth receiving Visitors from the direction of Deneb for a very brief time, leaving behind six Zones where they stayed, and a whole heap of very strange phenomena and artifacts are to be found in each. Scientists want to study but there is a black market for artifacts brought out of the Zones by "stalkers" who risk their lives, illegally entiring the unpredictable and lethal alien affected areas at night.

The story is told from three points of view but is really about only one of them, Red, a stalker whose motivations are not always entirely clear even to himself. Each viewpoint character has a distinct voice that carries over well in this translation. The writing is excellent, in fact and I assume that it does justice to the original Russian in this respect.

The freakish nature of some of the alien phenomena is imaginative and interesting - effects go well beyond the overtly technological and more and more weird and inexplicable interactions between humans and the Zones are revealed as the story moves forward.

Excellent, imaginative writing - why only two stars? Because the story just stops rather than finishes. Right at the climax. The reader never gets to find out what happens to Red and his family. It's enormously frustrating and disappointing after such a fine build up. I think readers deserved some kind of resolution to Red's story.