Books: The Snopeses

THE TOV/N (371 pp.)—William Faulkner—Random House ($3.95).

In his first novel in three years William Faulkner displays the vision of a Hieronymus Bosch rendered in the style of Grandma Moses. The demons who emerge from the earth are those old familiars—the Snopeses—and the earth is the red clay of Yoknapatawpha County, Miss. Yet Faulkner is not what he appears to be—a regional novelist; he is a novelist of the nether regions.

In The Hamlet (TIME, April 1, 1940), Faulkner told how Flem Snopes, a repellent specimen of white trash, sidled into Frenchman's Bend. Now,...