Clinging still to Sac Prairie—the small Wisconsin town which has been the scene of all his stories—August Derleth has written a brief novelette whose mood is that of poetry and legend. Its patterned prose, its air of melancholy, its rueful echoes from a more idyllic past, all remind one of Willa Cather—and especially of the Willa Cather who wrote "Lucy Gayheart." Renna, however, the hauntingly lovely heroine of "Any Day Now" is made of more fiery stuff than Miss Cather's pitiful Lucy….

Of all the men who clustered around Renna, met her at the station when she came home on holiday, made her name a byword for glamour, it was Doctor Joe who was clearly her favorite. Every one, Joe included, expected him to be her choice. When the hour struck, however, one magic midsummer night, Renna could not bring herself to say yes to him…. [She] was thwarted by the memory of her big, wonderful mother, who had been so fiercely ambitious for her child. "No young doctor," that dead voice had said. So it was that Renna wantonly denied love—and found too late, when Joe was lost, was married, that she would give anything to retract that denial. So she came, after Joe's death, to live achingly and wholly in the past.

This, in essence, is the very simple plot of "Any Day Now." Being an old plot, though a good one, the book would amount to little if Mr. Derleth had not invested it with special graces of atmosphere and style. The glamour which he conjures up, his pictures of quiet pleasures and still, moon-drenched nights in the village of Renna's youth—all this has a kind of enchantment. His story, in a sense, is an elegy for lost beauty, a lament for the havoc wrought by time. As for his prose, though it is too measured, too metrical, and hence a little monotonous, it does have a distinction which is half the charm of the book. "Any Day Now" is a very minor threnody, but as an interlude between sturdier novels it shows that Mr. Derleth is continuing to perfect his art. He has gone a long way since "Place of Hawks."