If the Mad Hatter and the Ugly Duchess had had a child, and the child had almost grown up, ["A Tree of Night and Other Stories"] are almost the kind of short stories he could be expected to write. Reading Truman Capote's first collection is, in fact, a good deal like a trip down the rabbit hole with a metropolitanized Alice, for the fey quality which underlay Mr. Capote's first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," is here fortunately absent.

In all eight stories, Mr. Capote appears to be concerned with what might be called the esthetics of unlikelihood….

Perhaps it is because Mr. Capote's people are so full of eerie compulsions which they make no protracted attempt to resist that the reader's resistance to them is accordingly steeled and hardened. Who wants, really, to crawl back into the twilit cave and roll the papier-mâché stone over the doorway? Who would want to let Alice's wonderland serve as the myth around which he organized his adult life? There are sufficiently enthralling problems on this side of the looking-glass and at this end of the rabbit-hole, and if that remark strikes the reader as rather stuffily moralistic, it might be rejoined that Mr. Capote's refusal to look squarely at the realm of the actual is in itself a form of stuffiness.

With these reservations, however, one must fairly assert for these stories a kind of triple power: a mind at times disciplined toward poetry, with a special skill at naming; a pleasant and only slightly grotesque humor, and an ability to suggest, as in the novel, the outlines of haunted personalities, so that several of the stories might be described as biographies of the bugaboo. (p. 7)

The humor, wild as a hatter in a kingdom of pinheads, is exemplified in "My Side of the Matter," which (as often in the book) betrays an implicit debt to the early Faulkner; or in the figure of the bibulous ex-clown Oreilly in "Master Misery." Being brought to bear upon the substance of the hauntednesses, this humor serves as a healthy corrective to what might otherwise verge on the unendurably imperturbable. The same is true of the poetry, where occasionally the act of right seeing brings the actual sharply to focus…. (pp. 7, 33)

[One] trusts in the author's ability to grow.

Which way he grows is his business. "Don't think you can pull the sheep over our eyes," cries one of his characters indignantly. In the novel Mr. Capote pulled wool; here, at any rate, it is a whole sheep. Later, he may get round to eliminating the sheep itself, and helping people to see more clearly into that special wonderland which he appears to inhabit. (p. 33)