Crusoe Nightmare

CASTAWAY--James Gould Cozzens--Random House ($1.75).

Suppose you had taken refuge from some pursuing calamity in a big metropolitan department store, and by some strange chance found it completely deserted. Suppose that for days on end nobody came to disturb you, as though no one but yourself were left in the world. And then suppose that one day you discovered that you were not quite alone after all, that somebody else was in the store too. These are the presumptions Author Cozzens makes the reader swallow. Once they are accepted, the rest of the circumstantial tale follows as nightmare the daydream. Able Author Cozzens always takes a leaf out of some good notebook. This time it is from Edgar Allan Poe's, Ambrose Bierce's, Daniel Defoe's.

Mr. Lecky, pursued by some imminent horror, went to ground in the basement of the department store. Gradually, as he heard no sounds of pursuit, he got up enough courage to seek a better hiding place. His first weapons of defense were a kitchen knife, a fire-axe. Literate but not handy, he found his way to the sporting-goods department, got a supply of guns but had to read the instruction book before he could load one. His first shelter he contrived out of a platform of doors placed over an open compartment. Later he fortified a lavatory, provisioned it by many weary trips to the grocery department. The elevators of course were not running; when he needed something from one of the lower floors it was a long haul back again. Mr. Lecky was beginning to get things well arranged, was even going unarmed, when he found himself face to face with the Other Man. From then on Mr. Lecky's world relapsed with horrifying swiftness into nightmare.

Up to a certain point, Author Cozzens unfalteringly directs a tale that might turn comic if he did not keep it rigid with suspense. What that point is the heavily-breathing reader will find out for himself.

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