Books: Boston Gothic

BOUNDARY AGAINST NIGHT—Edmund Gilligan—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Critics say that U. S. fiction began with the gothic romances of Charles Brockden Brown. They mean that it began with weird plots, wild scenes, frenzied speeches, mysterious encounters between mysterious characters. By next month Brown will have been dead 128 years, but U. S. fiction still has a gothic tradition that realists have never been able to conquer, running from Poe right down to the operatic extravagances of Thomas Wolfe. Last week its persistence was demonstrated by a long first novel that had all the ingredients...