LINKED BY THEIR common air of depressed solitude and the languorous rhythms of Irena Friedman Karafilly`s prose, the six vignettes in Night Cries (Oberon, 131 pages, $12.95 paper) evoke a small Aegean village where life is arduous, culture ancient, and foreigners forever unwelcome. These are tales of alienated, unaffiliated people who gladly pay the formidable price for the freedom they find in their status as perpetual foreigners. In "Strays" an American woman living alone on the island becomes an object of lascivious speculation for local soldiers. They circulate a preposterous rumour about her and the stray dog she has taken in, forcing her to leave although she has nowhere else to go. In "Dimitri: An Unfinished Portrait," a woman braves the virulent village gossip to live with a young, unsophisticated Greek dentist. Life is simple, he asserts, and it is only foreigners like herself who complicate it. The title story is the gem of this collection; it traces the relationship of two expatriates who meet, marry, and raise a child only to watch everything they have built destroyed by the isolation and backwardness of the village. The emblem for their anomie and fear is the night cry of the owl. Its eerie, lonely sound is an apt metaphor for the feeling that permeates this book.