Rim of the Morning by William Sloane

Nothing in life, I think, ordinarily happens in great, thunderous episodes of obvious and dramatic force.
--William Sloane, To Walk Back the Night

"Dick, this is too absurd.  We're plotting together like a couple of characters in a B picture.  It's all ridiculous somehow."
--William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water.

The estimable Edwin Frank of New York Review Books has brought out William Sloane's two books from the 30's in one volume, The Rim of Morning, as they were reissued in the 60's.  These books are an unusual blend of science fiction, horror, and mystery and each is narrated in the first person by an outsider who is drawn into the eerie plots by a friend.  In To Walk Back the Night two recent college graduates go to visit an old professor and watch in horror as he is consumed by a mysterious fire.  One of the pair ends up marrying the dead professor's wife, who is extremely beautiful and extremely strange, and it all ends in suicide and violence in the desert.  In The Edge of Running Water the narrator is a friend of a professor who is using mysterious means to contact his dead wife in an isolated house in Maine; the friend was also in love with the professor's wife and, while trying vainly to help his colleague, falls for the dead wife's sister.

As bizarre as these plots are, the books are narrated in a matter-of-fact way that makes them all the scarier.  It takes quite some time for Berkely Jones in To Walk Back the Night to discover how strange his friend Jerry's new wife is, as he looks into her background and finds she has none at all.  In The Edge of Running Water it takes some time for Richard Sykes to find out what his friend Julian Blair is up to, as the mysterious Mrs Walters runs interference and tries to keep Blair's work secret, work that gradually leads to violence and death. To Walk Back the Night captures the uneasiness one can feel about a friend's marriage and the difficulty of knowing the true history and personality of anyone.  The Edge of Running Water is about how one deals with death and grief and about the impossibility of keeping anything secret in a small town. These books are rather frightening because they suggest that the distance between the routine and the horrible can be small indeed.

I think that both these books would make excellent films if they were in the hands of a great director, such as Alfred Hitchcock, who understood horror can exist at any time, or anywhere.  Then I discovered Edward Dmytryk's film version of The Edge of Running Water, made under the title of The Devil Commands in 1940, which compresses all the detailed plot elements into a fairly typical "mad doctor" story. A better film version perhaps could have been made by Michael Curtiz, who in 1936 made The Walking Dead, a rather poignant story about a musician who was electrocuted for a murder he did not commit and was brought back to life by medical science.  I think that today's audiences are perhaps too impatient to get to the sensationalism and don't care enough about the complexities and psychology of human behavior.