+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p233 Ap 15 ’20 850w
BISS, GERALD. Door of the unreal. *$2 (3c) Putnam
20–19179
Strange disappearances are common in fact and in fiction, sometimes involving equally strange explanations, but surely in either realm, nothing could rival the solution of the mystery of this story. Of the four people who completely vanish from a well-traveled English road about midnight of a moonlight night, the only one who is ever seen again is Tony Ballingdon, and he is found unconscious and bruised in a nearby wood. Lincoln Osgood, an American who happens to be on the scene, makes a study of the case and soon forms a theory which proves to be the correct one, altho so weird and uncanny is it that he himself can hardly credit it. It is based on lycanthropy and its strange lore: in fact, it presupposes the existence in the neighborhood of two werewolves, Prof. Lycurgus Wolff and his old servant. By his knowledge of the subject Osgood prevents further tragedy and frees Dorothy, Wolff’s daughter, from the curse that is threatening her.
“With the understanding that the solution of the mystery of the novel lies along the lines of lycanthropy, the reader finds before him a smoothly written, straightforward narrative, lucid and compelling in its admirable simplicity, and endowed with that sustained interest which before anything else connotes a good story.”
+ N Y Times p23 S 19 ’20 760w
“A readable yarn it is.”
+ Review 3:350 O 20 ’20 330w
BLACHLY, CLARENCE DAN. Treatment of the problem of capital and labor in social-study courses in the churches. *50c Univ. of Chicago press 330.7