If the Mad Hatter and the Ugly Duchess had had a child, and the child had almost grown up, ["A Tree of Night and Other Stories"] are almost the kind of short stories he could be expected to write. Reading Truman Capote's first collection is, in fact, a good deal like a trip down the rabbit hole with a metropolitanized Alice, for the fey quality which underlay Mr. Capote's first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," is here fortunately absent.

In all eight stories, Mr. Capote appears to be concerned with what might be called the esthetics of unlikelihood….

Perhaps it is because Mr. Capote's people are so full of eerie compulsions which they make no protracted attempt to resist that the reader's resistance to them is accordingly steeled and hardened. Who wants, really, to crawl back into the twilit cave and roll the papier-mâché stone over the...