THE FANTASY WORLDS OF PETER STONE

Father Boyd's first book, Are You Running With Me, Jesus?, achieved a commercial and critical success that, thus far at least, has eluded its successor volumes. The present work shares the shortcomings of the latter rather than the achievement of the former. It comprises five ""fables"" which were conceived as commentaries on basic socio-religious problems: identity, the faces of anti-Semitism, the ""comfortable pew,"" racism, and the evolution of religious dogma. The fables or parables are, in themselves, interesting enough to hold one's attention of a Sunday morning. In book form, however, they seem clumsy, overwrought and out of focus. The problem is that Boyd obviously lacks the literary skill to express himself clearly in what is, after all, an exceedingly difficult literary form. He over-writes and over-dramatizes to the point that the reader's attention wanders in midstory, and his perception of the incongruous is heavy-handed. No Aesop he; nor even a La Fontaine. Still no one can ever accuse Father Boyd of dreariness, or of lack of imagination; and perhaps those considerations, coupled with the author's name, will gain some degree of attention for this book.