THE QUIET ENEMY and Other Stories
By
iss Dawkins' seven stories reveal a subtle, somewhat disquieting talent. From Alabama, her settings are often Southern, her people black and white. In ""Eminent Domain"", a gay young man takes it into his head to share the money an old woman is to receive for her homesite, scheduled for inundation, and is willing to are for Old Momma, who all uncomprehending thinks he is the devil and brings about their deaths rather than their deliverance. In ""The Buffalo Farm"", a Western trading ost acquires a new curiosity in the person of a madman billing himself as Christ then the desert blooms with the awful light of the atom bomb. ""The Mourner"" returns on and grandson to the setting where he again endures the old loves and hates, when escapes to his adult world. ""Hummers in the Larkspur"" sets a family disturbing its self-contained yet out-going genuineness in the heart of an arid Southern town and catalogues the affect tellingly. In the title story, the most complete of everal carefully constructed and unhurriedly presented stories here, the tragedy of ove revealed and then denied turns a man back to his war against the world and a woman back into herself. There is a curious subliminal glow here, a determined intelligence at work with materials of some scope and insistent individuality. Miss awkins is definitely worth watching.