The demons that haunt the Morris household [in "Dwell in the Wilderness"] are, of course, familiars of contemporary fiction, yet they are still terrifying. The psychopathological offshoots of nineteenth-century moralistic dualism have been studied before; they remain engrossing. Were Mr. Bessie equipped with the proper scientific implements with which to probe the character of Amelia, "Dwell in the Wilderness" might have been a fine novel. In its present form it is a disorganized, deceptively lifelike piece of work. It has moments of genuine horror and a continuous superficial verisimilitude. The material aspects of the family life are at all times sharply presented. Using a dozen different recent techniques of the novel—the interior monologue, the dream, the revery, newspaper citations, snatches of popular songs, the shifting point of view, the sharp parenthesis breaking the long, loose-jointed colloquial sentence—Mr. Bessie has contrived to make the behavior of his...