SOURCE: "Is Fiction Human?", in The Hudson Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Summer, 1958, pp. 294-301.

In the following excerpt, Mudrick provides a mixed review of King of the Mountain, reserving his praise only for the story "What's the Purpose of the Bayonet?".

George Garrett is another writer who has read his homework in Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar, and The New Yorker. "They were sitting in a little trattoria beside the Arno," he says abruptly [in a story in King of the Mountain]', and the befuddled reader, not yet informed that the latest American Bohemia is the land of the Caesars, may be excused for wondering what a trattoria is—restaurant? restroom?—and whether the Arno is a cartoon or a celebrated Spanish dancer. S. J. Perelman makes his living (in The New Yorker!) by disposing of this sort of writing for all time: "The Patagonian demi-vierges were shaking their...