New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World (1969)

First Edition.

Very good in dust jacket with a little edge wear and price clipped. Book is clean with tight binding.

The High Sierras, the Oregon back country, Hollywood, San Francisco and its environs provide settings for the two novellas and eight shorter pieces brought together in this uncommonly substantial and satisfying volume by the author of Hard Rain Falling and Blade of Light.

Among the six stories with which the collection begins is a brief, start, cooly shocking tale called "Limbo." The other five are longer, but not without shocks of their own.

"Road Show," about a trio of small-time entertainers-two white, one black-explodes into violence at the end.

"The Crossroader," which concerns a black pool-hall hustler who wins a signal victory in an all-white town, and "Blue Eyes," in which the confrontation is between whites and a half-Indian girl, recall the arresting early chapters of Hard Rain Falling.

In "New York to Los Angeles," two innocents from New York begin to discover Hollywood; "Silver Lamâe" concerns a very young man on the make in Mill Valley and a much older woman who knows exactly what she wants. Hollywood is again the setting for "The Art of the Film," which comprises two mordant companion pieces, starring in turn a shrewd old tycoon whose memories go back to the film industry's beginnings and a young newspaperman who becomes one of his latter-day hirelings.

The novellas are at opposite poles from each other. Set in a summer colony by a mountain lake, "The Murder of the Frogs," about a boy's first ecstatic and agonizing discovery of love, is almost an idyll-except for the episode from which it takes its title. "One of Those Big-City Girls," a San Francisco story, is a compassionate study of a woman, a depiction of human loneliness as haunting and memorable as Blade of Light. Don Carpenter emerges, in this book, not just as a superb storyteller who challenges comparison with the masters of the form, but also as a writer of impressive range and variety"