This literate (Lanning is an editor of the Kenyon Review) domestic diabolique which has a Dahliesque of sophisticated horror takes Place in a rural outback, where Johnny Bayden and his wife Eleanor retire to aa old house after his unspecified illness. There they buy an impulse item, a headless pedestal, which, with its incumbence, marks the disintegration of their marriage. While the pedestal seems to walk at night, On its clawed feet, Eleanor and Johnny exchange rasping hostilities; there is a shooting of a local character, their cleaning woman is a font of gossip; they become involved, intimately?, with another couple, and-------..... Lanning's novel is an act of possession, and Just as inevitable and inescapable as it should be.