SOURCE: "Spirit and Belief," in The North American Review, Vol. 273, No. 3, September, 1988, pp. 68-72.

Morris is an American editor and critic who frequently writes about John Gardner. In the following excerpt, he comments on Martin's focus on relationships and death in The Consolation of Nature.

The relationships drawn in Valerie Martin's The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories seem streaked with terror and fear. Love often warps into perversity, into its wolfish, angry shape; lovers become victims, prey and predator. In "Death Goes to a Party," this love-sinister is clearly prefigured in a fantastic love-masquerade encounter between Wolf and Death:

Then he lifted his face over hers and she saw that what she sought could not be found. His teeth were bared and he salivated so heavily that his mouth was frothy. His eyes were terrible—cold, uncanny, and mad with a kind of lust Atala had never...