A year or so ago, one of my freelance reviewers gave me an old paperback copy of To Walk the Night, first published in 1937, by an author new to me, William Sloane (1906–1974). It is one of only two novels written by Sloane, who edited a number of SF anthologies in the course of a distinguished career in book publishing. I recently read his other novel, The Edge of Running Water, first published in 1939 and collected with To Walk the Night in The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror, out this month from New York Review Books Classics with an introduction by Stephen King.
The subtitle says it all. In particular, To Walk the Night, a tale of alien possession, evokes the sort of cosmic dread that I associate with the best work of H.P. Lovecraft. Though Sloane achieves his effects through dialogue and character, the antithesis of Lovecraft’s approach, the great 20th-century horror author would surely have appreciated this subtle and suggestive work. A pity he died shortly before its publication.
King ranks The Edge of Running Water, about a mad scientist who builds a machine in an effort to communicate with his dead wife, above To Walk the Night. For me, The Edge of Running Water takes second place because the intrusion from the outside falls short of the dramatic heights of the analogous phenomenon in To Walk the Night. In addition, The Edge of Running Water includes a conventional romance, between the narrator and the scientist’s stepdaughter, that doesn’t belong in such fiction—or at least not according to Lovecraft. In contrast, the femme fatale at the heart of To Walk the Night is an unforgettable monster, in a league with Asenath Waite of Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” and Helen Vaughn of Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan.”
