THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB

Report repeated from the November 1st bulletin, when scheduled for early spring publication, as follows: ""Mockery, then mockery shadowed with bitterness- and then the bitterest cup of all- a father watching his daughter go through the door to death with leukemia- this is the climax in Don Wanderhope's life. Younger son of Dutch immigrants, his brother Louis' worldliness is a touchstone against the rigid Calvinism of the family and, after Louis' death, Don explores many ways of escape. He is able to avoid marriage to Greta with a light case of T.R.; his stay in Colorado ends with the death of Rena, a fellow patient; Chicago is finally left behind when he does marry Greta and their life in Westchester is marked by her instability which causes infidelity. Her suicide leaves him to center his life around young Carol and when leukemia is diagnosed he holds on to every hope. Through the tests, the drugs, the remissions and the explosions, at home in the Children's Pavilion that is a 'slice of hell"", he rails against the 'art of prolonging disease' and the march of the morbid cells, and belabors belief and faith. And with Carol's death he is enclosed in a loneliness without solace. From the grotesque, to the comic, to the tragic, De Vries handles a more intense story in a bittersweet manner that breaks away from his previous books in its concern with religion and the 'slaughter of the innocents'.