THE OCTOBER COUNTRY

..... casts a somber spell, death is a familiar figure, and fancied fears assume a devastating reality. This for Mr. Harris, who broods about his bones while his flesh wastes away; for a young mother destroyed by The Little Assassin she has delivered; for a young woman in Mexico, whose visit to a catacomb of the unburied dead vitiates her in the knowledge that she will be The Next In Line. There's the amorphous horror in The Jar; The Dwarf who hopes to find the contradiction of his deformity in the distortion of a mirror; the weird, winged assemblage of Homecoming, etc. etc.... The chilling imaginative virtuosity, the malignant momentum of terror, the occasional tenderness give these short stories a real superiority.