SOURCE: "With a Whimper and a Bang," in The New York Times Book Review, March 2, 1958, p. 4.

In the following review, Stern offers a highly favorable assessment of King of the Mountain.

This first book by George Garrett begins in innocence, with a boy's whimper, and ends in evil, with a bang. Long before the bang comes you will know that the author is out of the top of the literary drawer.

Mr. Garrett is aware, as was the young Hemingway, of the attraction of the first person singular and the second plural ("Ask me why I pick that time and I'll tell you"), of the sense of immediacy and intimacy the confidential technique can produce, of the power it has, like the sudden use of Christian names, to engage your full attention. But Mr. Garrett is no mere charmer. In some twenty stories he says more, and more...