Fall of the House of Pride
Author Leonard Cline has been weaving spells* in the vicinity of Englewood, N. J. He has regrown the virgin forest there and placed in its tangled heart a mansion full of dark madness.
In Mordance Hall lives Richard Pride, whose madness is living life over again, living it beside himself with audacious backward excursions into the lives of people he has known. This he does by the aid of drugs and a corps of skilled, secret investigators. In his sepulchral study, entombed by the inky transcripts of his assistants, he traces bizarre designs through the dead mold of past existence.
He is, or suggests, a werewolf. His dog is a jet wolf-dog whose name means Death. His wife, Miriam, has turned into a spiritual succubus, slowly extracting from her lovers their health and sanity and a psychic poison which she hopes to distill to a potency that will humble Richard Pride. Their daughter, Janet, flowers like a enamel blossom. Wilfred Hough is the bloodless wraith of what was a bright young secretary a few years ago, before Miriam used him. A young voodoo Negress moves through the house, darkness serving darkness in silence, and with a small drum. Finally, there is the narrator, Oscar Fitzalan, a youth engaged to furnish musical accom- paniments for Richard Pride's mysteries.
The story is almost entirely nocturnal and consists chiefly in young Fitzalan's survival of the chess, the astrology, the hierophantastic bedchamber of his witch-hostess; the drugged diversions of his host. Composing a ballet-cantata to the solar system is all that keeps Fitzalan from succumbing to so much spiritual midnight. He tries to rescue Janet from the deathly mesh of the place, but fails. Wilfred Hough commits suicide, on a chandelier. All the Prides and the dog Death are horribly dead by the end of the book. Over Mordance Hall comes "a nest of ferns, crawling, vermiform. . . ."
The Significance of this book may be considerable. It is the third novel by an author of whom it has been fairly said that he "can write rings round half a dozen of our ten best novelists." His first book, God Head, had tremendous physical force. His second, Listen Moon!, was young-animal, lyrical, pensive. Now he has opened a squamous dungeon of the mind and explored it with the erudite perversity of a cheerier, juicier Poe. Like all horror stories it is belittled by its own theatricality yet it remains an amazingly worded orgy of the more unspeakable human propensities.
The Author is in prison. One dawn last summer, police found him in a daze in front of his home at Mansfield, Conn., with a discharged shotgun in his hands. Within lay one Wilfred Peter Irwin, shot in the back, dying. Both men had been drinking for days. Before the guest died he swore his host was innocent, the shooting an accident. But Leonard Cline must stand trial for murder. Until the plot of that true story is unraveled next month before a grand jury, one of the most promising careers in U. S. literature is in abeyance. Factitious folk have tried, futilely, to draw conclusions from the identical first names of Mr. Cline's unfortunate guest and one of his minor characters.
Prior to turning novelist, Leonard Cline wrote on art, music and books for newspapers in Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Manhattan. He was born in Bay City, Mich., 34 years ago.
Wrighteousness