THE UNLEASHED WILL

A first novel, this is a community closeup of a crime as Clear Water, Minn., witnesses the rape and murder of fifteen year old May Lou Godwin by her brother, Paul, and the preconditioning of the crime is brushed in, chronologically, cumulatively. Here were the Godwins, poor but upstanding, Abel with his rougher ways, Henrietta who was placidly maternal, vigilantly Methodist, and her death which was to affect Paul more than was evident on the surface. Paul, constrained, self righteous, intense, in contrast to the saucy, pretty Mary Lou, lived in the self-deception of his power, his godliness, was driven by a sudden violence to kill, was sustained thereafter by a wild elation... Further fictionization of pathological deviation and delusion, here the brutality is offset by the commonplaces of community ways and talk, though for effectiveness other books in this genre have been more successful.