RACHEL WEEPING

A Triptych""- three long short stories- strays from the suspense field, but not too far, since all of them rely on some fairly drastic deviations from the commonplace. In The Idyll, the neat, careful lives of the Merrimans are interrupted by the disappearance of their nine year old girl- who walks off with a stranger, later learned to be a psycho escaped from a hospital. In Tho The Pleasant Life is Dancing Round, Oliver, charming, clever, loved at home and well liked everywhere, cannot shake off the pointlessness of the days which he finally chooses to end- with a rope. In The Climate of the Lost, a young girl, the victim of a nomadic, nymphomanic mother, knows the innocence of a first love- and the perverse violation of her mother's lover.... Miss Smith handles her combustible situations with a certain discretion and achieves thereby effectively shattering results.