DESCENT INTO HELL

By the English poet, novelist, critic, known chiefly in this country as the author of All Hallows' Eve which was published last fall, this is again a literary abstraction concerned with the interplay of good and evil, past and present, the dead and the living, and the redemptive force of love. Battle Hill, an English village where one great wrongs had been committed, is the scene of a drama both temporal and supernatural enacted chiefly by two; Wentworth, an older man, living in a house haunted by a suicide whose recurrent dreams of a rope and a descent into hell change when his active pursuit of Adela, a young woman, is replaced by his fantasies of an imaginary Adela; and Paulin a girl, whose young years have been shadowed by apparitions of herself... A strange sto with a spiritual, symbolic content often oblique, in prose of exceptional quality.