Three characters form the dominant focus of attention in The Damnation Game. Of these, the least interesting from a purely literary point of view is Joseph Whitehead, the ambitious gambler who seeks out and ultimately loses the game which gives the work its title.

Whether it be owing to the seeming inevitability of the outcome (something to which readers have perhaps become conditioned through a long tradition of Faustian narratives) or the author's own lack of interest in the Promethean urges which create these situations, it is clear that the most powerful characterization is given to the tempter and not the tempted.

Mamoulian, known at times as The Last European, is not the Devil (he quite specifically denies this allegation at one point in the narrative), but he represents a vision of damnation of which the archfiend would certainly approve. Once a man, he relinquished his humanity to...