Sweet Child

THE BAD SEED (247 pp.}--William March--Rinehart ($3).

The Bad Seed is a novel that started badly. At least Author William March thought so. When he was a third of the way through, he tossed it away and started all over again. Readers with a low tolerance for pure horror may well wish he had not tried a second time. For The Bad Seed is an authentic chiller; not a member of the murder mystery species, but a novel about seemingly quite ordinary people with terror built in.

Everyone loved Rhoda Penmark. She was a charming child of eight, neat, precise, with delightful manners. Her brown bangs and braids, her dimple and the cute gap between her front teeth made her a favorite of all the neighbors. She could devastate her parents by simply tossing her head charmingly and asking: "What will you give me, if I give you a basket of kisses?" The loving reply always was: "I'll give you a basket of hugs."

Then why did all her schoolmates fear and hate her? Why was she put out of a progressive school in Baltimore, and why did the old-fashioned sisters who ran an old-fashioned school in a Gulf coast city put her out of theirs not long after Rhoda's father was transferred to the South? Before The Bad Seed is fully under way, Mrs. Penmark knows the answers to these questions, and the shock is more than she can bear. For Rhoda is a born bundle of sweet-miened sin, a youngster of good family and favorable environment who is quite ready to kill others for whatever she may covet.

In Baltimore she killed an old-lady neighbor in her 80s, Mrs. Clara Post, by simply pushing her over a bannister into a stairwell. That way Rhoda got an opal pendant which Mrs. Post had promised to leave her when she died. Rhoda was seven then. Rhoda was a good student. In the old maids' school she tried earnestly to win the penmanship medal. When she lost it to another student, she snatched it from him at the annual school picnic, then shoved him off a dock and drowned him to cover the theft.

Mrs. Penmark becomes fully aware of her daughter's character. Before she can bring herself to act, Rhoda burns alive the sleeping handyman who has guessed her part in the drowning. What her mother learns about her own share in Rhoda's guilt, what she does about it and how Rhoda makes out are non-cricket revelations. But The Bad Seed cannot be put aside without lingering shivers.

Despite its unnecessary plot complications, it remains a troubling case history of the transmittal of evil from one generation to another.

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