ANTHONY BOUCHER'S GREATEST HORROR STORY

While admitting "They Bite's" virtues as a story, I still think "Review Copy" is the greater fiction. Since I complained of the exposition scene in "They Bite," let me begin with the structure of "Review Copy." The time overlaps with the seventh scene (of three paragraphs), set inside Mallow's house-that is, the explosion in the last paragraph of the sixth scene is the same as the explosion in the last paragraph of the seventh. [...]these scenes of alternating focal characters reach their simultaneity here. (142-43) This seems odd in a magician, particularly one who seems to be using black magic: he has a flame burning in a pentangle (142); he speaks of "compelling] the Ab" (142); he has Blackland inside the pentangle as he makes an incision in Blackland's wrist, so the blood will drip on a "container of thick black stuff" (143)-presumably the basis for the black ink of the book; and he "tosse[s] a handful of powder into the flame and beg[ins] to chant" at the end of the scene (143). Besides this impulse to talk his customer out of using magic, the magician's thoughts also show him to be psychologically astute-in modern terms-which increase his complexity when combined with his practice of magic. Besides other editorial work, he has published essays on Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and some related authors, as well as such popular writers as Anthony Boucher, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Poul Anderson, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Gene Wolfe, and such standard authors as the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Tennyson, and John Heath-Stubbs.