In "Place of Hawks," a series of four novelettes so closely interrelated that they practically form a unit, Mr. Derleth deals with the kind of material which William Faulkner has copyrighted, though his point of view is essentially different. Horror and madness are his principal themes, but they are presented sanely, with pity and compassion.

Mr. Derleth has a highly developed sense of form. The pattern which he has chosen to bind his four tales together is so logical and apt that "Place of Hawks" resembles a novel rather than the usual collection of stories. His mouthpiece is a young boy, Steve Grendon, who is in the habit of driving round the countryside with his grandfather, a doctor….

Each of the four families whose stories Mr. Derleth tells is burdened with obsessions and clutching vainly at sanity. Linda Grell, knowing that her possessive family is close to madness, struggles without success to escape their hold. Rella Farway, driven over the borderline by her fanatic hatred of the land, involves the whole Farway clan in her mania for destruction. Mrs. Ortell, intelligent and self-sacrificing in her moments of lucidity, solves the problem of approaching madness with a fine dignity. The decline of the Pierneau family, upon whom lies the hidden curse of miscegenation, has a tragic beauty consonant with their past.

To deal credibly with such melodramatic material is not an easy feat. Mr. Derleth brings it off because he is so restrained and so coolly matter-of-fact. By choosing a child as observer he has, moreover, lessened his problem. Steve Grendon, to be sure, tells his stories in retrospect, but he tells only those things which were apprehended by his youthful eyes. Mr. Derleth is consequently under no necessity to trace back the roots of all these pitiful obsessions.

One grasps their essential outlines from Steve's observations supplemented by the comments of his parents and his grandfather, but there is no complex Freudian excavation into the seeds of tragedy. It exists—that is all—and one is convinced of its reality because Mr. Derleth obviously knows these Wisconsin derelicts so well….

Mr. Derleth does not impress one as a writer unduly attracted to the abnormal. He is merely giving a picture of a small prairie community where isolation and inbreeding have done their deadly work, and if the picture seems somewhat highly colored it is because he has chosen to stress the extraordinary rather than the commonplace. "Place of Hawks" is a grim but not a morbid book. It may not be realism in the strictest sense, but on its own terms it compels belief.