Unquestionably the greatest aspect of the book is the self-construction of its narrator, the protagonist's best friend, as a drunken Oedipal mess. To Walk the Night is a mystery centred on a grisly unexplained death, blending themes of alien minds, advanced physics and psychic projection. As King drives home, Sloane captures much of the same horror as Lovecraft - horror of a "cosmic" type - without the oft-tortured prose. King nicely puts the novels in literary context, for instance playing them off against the acknowledged giant of 1930s American horror, H.P. To this end, NYRB Classics did well to secure Stephen King's short introduction to the text. Sloane's novels are a perfect storm of pulp sensibility and overall good writing. They stand out rather on account of their not inconsiderable literary qualities. The novels stand out not so much by their narratives - which today seem rather formulaic and too obvious, even if at the time they were inventively reworking the existing formulae. Both are genre-blending narratives which borrow elements of horror, hardboiled mystery, and science-fiction (then a burgeoning genre in its own right). The latter was adapted into a Boris Karloff movie, The Devil Commands (1941). Novels, recently collected by NYRB Classics as The Rim of Morning, were To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939). World as an editor and publisher than as a novelist. A quick scan of William Sloane's biography reveals that he contributed more to the literary
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