["A Tree of Night and Other Stories"] contains one extraordinarily good story plus three or four others less good but still memorable that should help redeem Truman Capote, the writer, from that other Capote, the creature of the advertising department and the photographer…. The boy author has been a standard feature of our literature ever since the beginnings of romanticism, and I suppose our generation is entitled to one of its own, but surely Capote deserves better than being fixed in that stereotype.

True, his work shows the occasional overwriting, the twilit Gothic subject matter, and the masochistic uses of horror traditional in the fiction of the boy author …, but Capote has, in addition, an ability to control tone, an honest tenderness toward those of his characters he can understand (children and psychotics), and a splendid sense of humor—seldom remarked upon. In the best of his stories, Children on Their Birthdays, he grasps a situation at once ridiculous and terrible, creating out of the absurdities of love and death among children a rich tension lacking in his other stories, even such successful performances as The Tree of Night and Miriam. On the whole, the level of achievement of these shorter pieces of fiction seems to me a good deal higher than that of Capote's novel, "Other Voices Other Rooms," whose occasional triumphs of style or characterization are more than balanced by poor structure and a general air of padding and pastiche. (p. 395)

He has certain disturbing faults even in the shorter forms, most notably an inability to hear and reproduce common speech; and when he tries occasionally to tell a whole story through the mouth of a simple or vulgar character (My Side of the Matter), he fails dismally. But in his hands the fairy tale and ghost story manage to assimilate the attitudes of twentieth-century psychology without losing their integrity, without demanding to be accepted as mere fantasy or explained as mere symbol. (pp. 395-96)

In Capote's stories the fairy world, more serious than business or love, is forever closing in upon the skeptical secure world of grown-ups. Only his children—and the natural allies of children, clown or lunatic—are competent to deal with the underground universe of the incredible; they quite simply believe in it. Children are Capote's greatest successes….

Mr. Capote writes not merely of children but from their side; his stories are the kid's imagined revenge upon maturity. Adults find neither mercy nor tenderness in these tales…. Capote's children are the bearers of this mystery, and no adult ever faces down a child in his stories. (p. 396)