A SENSE OF DARK

Death is death. It doesn't have to be heaven. Just naked, unmarried."" Although for most of Brian D. Locke's young life death and heaven are affiliated and the child who loses his father and his uncle and his mother (a shattering scene) during the Blitz is motivated to kill to rejoin them there. Affirmed by the loss of Megan, his first girl at Oxford. Thus Locke goes to America to join the Marines, and after his induration at Parris Island, is with the Dog Company in Korea where he becomes known as Kamikaze Locke for his suicidal recklessness and where, as death's deputy, he records 76 kills in his notebook. Responsible for the gratuitous action which takes the lives of too many of his company, he is tried for insubordination, sent back to the States to hard labor in a quarry, retrieved to serve as interpreter back in the lines where he now realizes that there is perhaps something to be saved. . . Still, an overwhelmingly desolate book which will hopefully not pass altogether unmarked--under the dogtags of personal identification, a universal protest, and in the detritus of this experience, a strong talent exposed.