Books: Life with the Damned

SAY NOTHING (217 pp.)—James Han-ley—Horizon ($3.95).

This bitter, brittle work has the qualities of a Byzantine mosaic. Its characters are rigidly, severely drawn; its setting is in "a tight house in a tight town where night has the depth of caves and daylight has no arch." It is written in a stream of harsh-sounding consonants, and its dialogue is a succession of jagged-edged monosyllables. Altogether, it is a novel calculated not to warm the reader but to awe him—a familiar feat for British Novelist James Hanley, 61, whose past novels have won him critical,...