[Fantasy and Fugue is a] study of the origin and consequences of a guilty obsession (the hero is sure he has killed a man, but why and how are mysteries to him almost to the end) [which] takes the reader into some extremely strange backwaters of literary London. Fay Lavington is a dreadful girl, and, in their separate ways, Clarence Rimmer, Charles Legge, and Bob Midwinter are pretty repulsive specimens, too. They are not, however, without their conversational charms … and their behavior is also moderately bizarre. Mr. Fuller is known in London as a poet of some distinction, and his book is written with a style very rare in works of this kind. In spite of an almost unendurably lurid climax, it is a remarkably exciting story as well. (pp. 175-76)

A review of "Fantasy and Fugue," in The New Yorker (© 1956 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol...