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Poe & Dali. The Visionary Novels of George Macdonald are essentially religious visions of purgatory as it might have been imagined by Edgar Allan Poe and Salvador Dali. Long out of print, the novels have a special appeal for those who relish the mystical allegories of Charles Williams (TIME, April 10, 1950). In Lilith, the better of the two tales, a raven comes knocking at the chamber door of a bookish man named Mr. Vane and leads him out into a nightmare limbo of lost souls. While trying to find his own soul, Mr. Vane falls in and out of the clutches of Lilith, a kind of dea sex machina. She is a quick-change artist who. likes to romp around as a spotted leopardess and suck the blood of infants. After two or three babies drop at Mr. Vane's feet, he wises up to Lilith and her evil ways. Author Macdonald relies heavily on props such as hybrid monsters, cat-women, enchanted landscapes, strange music, and a small army of skeletons. All are intended as projections of Mr. Vane's sinful state. His guiding raven turns out to be Adam and helps Mr. Vane shed the old wicked self and attain peace of soul.
Though Macdonald's style has some of the glaring defects of Victorian Gothic, few writers have so fascinatingly portrayed a man pursued by the hound of heaven and a pack of his own neuroses.