James Nicoll Reviews

William Sloane’s 1937 To Walk the Night¹ is a stand-alone cosmic horror novel.

Berkeley "Bark" Jones visits Dr. Lister, the man who was effectively Bark’s father. Bark has two grim tasks: to deliver to Lister the ashes of Lister’s son Jerry, and to explain to the doctor the events leading up to Jerry’s suicide.

It began with a burning astronomer.

Visiting Jerry’s mentor, Professor LeNormand, Bark and Jerry are aghast to see the old scholar sitting in a chair, engulfed in flames. Despite the pair’s immediate action, they are unable to save LeNormand. Indeed, LeNormand might well have been dead before Bark and Jerry arrived.

Being good university men, Bark and Jerry inform the university that there has been a terrible calamity at the observatory. Not being idiots, they realize that the investigation could well have dire consequences for them. The facts suggest that LeNormand was murdered. Jerry and Bark’s eyewitness account rules out any notion that someone other than LeNormand, Jerry, and Bark could have been at the observatory. Nevertheless, they resolve to tell the truth.

Although blaming the two graduates would neatly tie up the case, Sheriff Alan Parsons believes their seemingly wild account. Otherwise, the case is a mystery: LeNormand is known mostly for being a scientific crank whose contra-Einstein “A Fundamental critique of the Einstein Space-Time Continuum”² failed to convince his colleagues. Who would kill a kook?

Bark and Jerry are astonished to learn that LeNormand was recently married. His widow, Selena, is an oddity: clearly brilliant, oddly unsocialized, badly dressed, and astonishingly beautiful. The uncanny woman calmly accepts the fact of her husband’s death.

To Bark’s irritation, Jerry is smitten with Selena. A whirlwind romance follows. Despite a laundry list of reasons to delay marriage, not least of which is that marrying the widow gives Jerry a motive to knock off LeNormand, the pair are soon married.

Sheriff Alan Parsons keeps the case open as his personal project. He makes no headway in determining who killed LeNormand or how. He does, however, make the interesting discovery that just before Selena appeared, mentally disabled Louella Jamison vanished. He cannot be sure that they are the same person. Nor can he explain how a woman who could not even dress herself transformed into a genius.

To the extent that Selena has emotions as humans experience them, she is happy. The only dispute between her and Jerry is his insistence on pursuing LeNormand’s research. It’s a disagreement that will end in death.

~oOo~

About the cover art: the Del Rey cover is unremarkable except that it features what appear to be period-inappropriate computer banks. Various editions of the book seem torn which elements to highlight in the covers: the deaths, the weirdness, or Selena’s pulchritude. For some reason, the artists who focused on the last element overlook the fact that she dresses like she is an alien with absolutely no fashion sense.

To Walk the Night was one of two novels by William Sloane. The other, The Edge of Running Water, I remember as being a bit of a disappointment. This would explain why I don’t have a copy of Edge.

Although this novel was written and is set in the 1930s³, the Great Depression seems not to have affected Bark or Jerry in any significant way. It does play a minor role, however: the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act drives a significant background event.

Bark is an interesting character. He is content to have women as platonic friends, but has no visible interest in dating them. He has an exceptionally discerning eye where fashion is concerned. He is Jerry’s constant companion and has been since Lister provided them with adjoining bedrooms. He’s bitterly jealous when Selena comes between Jerry and Bark.

Bark is also, as the plot makes clear, not the sharpest crayon in the box. This probably saves his life. The quality Selena values most in her beaus is intelligence. As soon as circumstances allowed, she sought out and married LeNormand. When LeNormand perished, she wasted no time winning Jerry’s heart. Unfortunately, as LeNormand and Jerry discover, Selena is hard to live with.

This is all terribly atmospheric. The signs point to something being off about Selena, but not in any way that would justify officials taking a closer look at her. Selena is kind enough to provide illumination concerning certain odd events⁴, once she is certain the facts cannot be generally shared. That’s convenient for the reader because it didn’t seem likely that either Parsons or Bark would have fully understood what was going on. IMHO, leaving it all as a weird mystery that is never resolved might have been more effective.

To Walk the Night is available here (New York Review of Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find To Walk the Night (in any form) at Bookshop UK.

1: I followed a whim when deciding to review this book. I remembered something about it, but could not remember the title or the author, only the distinctive Del Rey cover… plus a vague sense that I’d recently seen it in the S or T section of my library. I spent a lot of time looking for it without luck, even poking through the ISFDB entries for late 1980 Del Rey MMPB in hopes I’d see the cover. Eventually, I did remember “Sloane,” which let me track it down in a particularly hard to see corner of the shelf.

Having remembered it was Sloane, I looked him up in the ISFDB. Interestingly, he edited two anthologies, one of which, Stories for Tomorrow (1955), was published by Funk and Wagnalls, whom I don’t remember as an SF publisher. My local university library has a copy. I wonder how it would read seventy years after publication?

2: I generally assume some element of antisemitism in “Einstein was wrong!” crankery, but in LeNormand’s case that does not seem to be a factor. Of course, he’s dead and on fire the first time the reader encounters him, greatly impeding a frank exchange of opinions.

Einstein is mentioned as having a potential motive for killing LeNormand, but this is immediately discounted and Einstein is not hauled in and grilled. As he was entirely innocent, that’s for the best.

3: This is set in the Thirties, hence the lack of comprehensive, intrusive databases to which a modern Parsons could turn to determine if Selena and Louella Jamison are the same person. USA delenda est.

4: Her motivations seem a bit obscure, but in context that makes sense.