In 1945 Derleth wrote that this was the best among the several novels he'd so far confected. For the record, in this house, we consider SHADOW IN THE GLASS the best, but that is, quite literally, another story -- and besides, it hadn't yet been written. Those with some knowledge of his work can understand why he felt that way at the time, but can also see some of his characteristic flaws in this nonetheless likeable story of young love in a small town. Inevitably there would have been plenty of them, considering that he claimed to have written these two-hundred pages in twenty days. Considering too what else was being written around this time, the virtual absence of sex is hard to credit, doubly so for those who know anything about Derleth's breathless personal life. And yet again,the hero's totally unprepared and implausible attempt to organize a conspiracy of the town's young people against the older bluenoses is just -- well, silly. On the other hand, Derleth's emotional honesty is very impressive, and his descriptions of night and Nature remind one that he is after all, one of the two or three best Nature-writers in the history of North American literature, a contention which I suspect I share with few others, but which I believe passionately nonetheless.
A word or two is necessary about the the efforts of George Vanderburgh, publisher of this edition. Without his efforts, I suspect that Derleth would have slipped into virtual invisibility in the years since his death in 1971. That being conceded, it's simply astonishing that this volume should be riddled with so many typos as to make some passage almost incomprehensible. One could understand this in a simple phot-offset re-printing, but this edition seems to have been re-set, and the results were disastrous. ( )