Books: Psychotic

HANGOVER SQUARE -Patrick Hamilton -Random House ($2.50).

Hangover Square, by the author of two hair-raising plays -Rope’s End (1929) and this winter’s Angel Street -is a psychiatric case history written as a horror story. Its victim, George Harvey Bone, is a big, bewildered Englishman who suffers from “dead moods.” Textbooks would call him a schizophrenic. When George meets Netta, a beauty who has the torpid heartlessness of a late Roman Emperor, he collapses into a state of slavery which is emotionally uninhabitable. When Netta and her friends persecute George, just for the fun of it, his “spells,” once mere vacant withdrawals from life, blossom into aggressive daydreams of murder.

Out of the fight between George’s civilized inhibitions and his insane (but not ir rational) compulsion to find peace by killing Netta, Author Hamilton builds a cold, sleek story which readers will ap preciate in proportion to 1) their taste for horror, 2) their taste for psychiatry.