Except for "Wuthering Heights" and "Jude the Obscure," it would be impossible to cite another serious novel in English so cumulative of horror as "Hatter's Castle." There have, of course, been scores of stories written with the deliberate purpose of making the reader's hair stand on end and chills course up and down the spine. But the creation of such works is a kind of game, in which the writer is abetted by the reader; entertainment is the purpose of the author's tour de force. "Hatter's Castle" we take to be no such book. Dr. Cronin, we are convinced, has gone about his work scarcely less seriously than did Emily Brontë; his delineation of James Brodie [the protagonist] is clearly intended as portraiture, and the novel, therefore, is not to be judged from the standards set up by Poe and Stevenson. We say all this at the outset...