Books: Evil Demons

SHINING SCABBARD—R. C. Hutchinson —Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Ghost stories are rare in contemporary fiction. But their traditional stage properties—creepy old houses, strange cries at night, creaking witches who mumble obscurely—are still standbys for romantic novelists who exclude the supernatural from their tales. Last week the Book-of-the-Month Club offered its members a weird, wild-eyed novel that has all the elements of a good ghost story except a ghost. To compensate for this deficiency, most of the large cast of characters who figure in Shining Scabbard are a shadowy and illusive folk, bearing so...