“Gandle Follows His Nose” by Heywood Broun (Boni & Liveright 1926). Our Scripps-Howard correspondent turns out a short allegorical fantasy which concerns itself with the adventures of one Bunny Gandle who, when 18 years of age, was taken, by his uncle, to the sorcerer Boaz, wherefrom he managed to escape with the cape of invisibility. We travel with him to strange lands. We hear of his finding and the subsequent loss of the magic lamp, his victory over the God Kla, the repulsion of the armies of King Helgas, and his sojourn in the Land of the Flying Sword. We meet our old friend, Yom, the genie who is much perturbed when Gandle orders him to bring a poached egg, of all things. Yom, incidentally, tenders young Gandle some sage advice concerning Life which the youth cannot grasp. Who can blame him, as the genie had 5694 years of experience? The underlying current in this piece is that of “wishfulfilment,” which I think, was what Broun primarily had in mind. It makes novel reading from all angles. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE Part Six by H. P. Lovecraft (Copyright 1927, W. Paul Cook) Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chap-books of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like DeFoe’s _Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, a homely tale of a dead woman’s spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne’s reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling—the era of new joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day—such as Smollett’s _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom_—the released instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the “Gothic” school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard