Whoever conceived the idea for "Place of Hawks" has, with the best intentions, done August Derleth a disservice…. [The] first sample of his [short stories] to appear in book form is a literary hybrid that misses both ways. Composed of four long stories which together attempt to constitute a unified pattern, it cannot by the most elastic definition of the term he called a novel; as a representative collection of short stories it is a singularly poor job of selection. I am afraid that readers encountering Mr. Derleth for the first time in these pages will notice his faults and overlook his talents, as they would not in a less tricky and arbitrary arrangement.

It is easy to understand the temptation to those responsible for assembling the volume's contents: Mr. Derleth has written an unusual story, a haunting and oddly poetic boyhood memoir of an old Wisconsin family, the last of the line, whose strain has become darkened with an obsession verging on madness and at times slipping over the border. He has written another with the same setting and a somewhat similar subject…. It sounds good. It sounds very good. But it just doesn't come off.

The author handicaps himself at the start by choosing to cast all four episodes in the first-person narrative form, and by making the narrator a very young child. This is a mechanism difficult enough to employ naturally in isolated stories; when used as it is here its artificial creakings cannot be disguised. One does not notice any technical strain in "Five Alone," the story with which the book opens; one accepts the little boy who drives around the countryside of Sac Prairie with his doctor-grandfather in the latter's gig, and one accepts his account of how he gradually pieced together the melancholy history of Linda Grell, who tried to escape from the prison of a semimad family relationship and found she could not live in her freedom. The overheard conversations, the confidences made to little Steve by people wandering in a world of their own devising, the accidental happening to be with grandfather at all the times when grandfather is summoned to assist the Grells or Linda through a crisis—these devices are woven so skillfully into the dark, dreamy mood of the story that they are hardly visible to the reader. It is when Mr. Derleth is forced to repeat them and to supplement them with clumsier means of revelation—grandfather talking in his sleep, at great length and most coherently, is one example—that he loses us as participants and believers in the strange lives he is depicting and we become observers of a craftsman whose performance seems a little tiresome, a little bungling.

Monotony and a labored attempt to cure it lie, in fact, rather heavily over the book as a whole. Mr. Derleth's variations on the same theme are not varied enough. His imbecile boys, his octogenarians confusing past with present, his fear-ridden descendants of an insane ancestor turning to suicide as they feel themselves drifting toward the madhouse, his normal folk crushed and bewildered by the burden of caring for an abnormal loved one, are all too much of a piece. It is hard to separate them in one's mind after finishing the book, and it also is hard to disentangle the plot-structure of one story from another because the development of each follows such a fixed pattern, inevitably ending in at least one unnatural death and generally in two or three.

My advice is to read "Five Alone" and the title story—which is confused and somewhat padded but contains some remarkably done atmosphere—and put the book aside.