Hoot Owl at Large

PRESENTING MOONSHINE--John Collier--Viking ($2.50).

There is not one decent, sensible story in Presenting Moonshine. Author John Collier is crazy as a hoot owl. But perched on the gnarled limb of satire, he blinks down with dry wisdom at a world much crazier than he. Effortlessly he glides into madness.

A young man, with a bowler hat, cane, flaxen moustache, and blue suit was looking at a gorilla in a zoo. . . . Perceiving that they were alone, the gorilla addressed the young man as follows: "You look very good-natured. Get me a suit like yours, only larger, a bowler hat, and a cane. We will dispense with the moustache. I want to get out of here. I got ambitions."

The gorilla writes a bestseller, almost seduces the young man's wife, ends up with a jail sentence and "a positive hatred of literature."

The gorilla adventure--and worse--is logical enough in a universe "shaped exactly like a pint of beer, in which the nebulae were the ascending bubbles." This was the astronomical discovery of another young man "who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad, but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey." Such Collier characters naturally gravitate into the company of demons, nymphs and other undesirable elements. They have only to approach a secondhand shop, zoo, greenhouse or midnight bridge when the fictitious rational world dissolves and Author Collier is at home among the fierce realities of the occult. Even a huge department store, in two tales, becomes a faery land forlorn.

Collier's tales are much like those of Lord Dunsany (Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens). But his taste is less for the dewy groves of dancing pixies than for the chasms and black alleyways where fiends hang out. Nor is this the madness of James Thurber (The Owl in the Attic, Fables for Our Time), smelling of neurosis, manic depression and similar 20th-Century ills. Collier offers a fuller-blooded evil often conjured up with appropriate 17th-Century English suggesting the grimmer scenes of King Lear. From that play he plucked titles for two former books: Defy the Foul Fiend and Tom's Acold. Author Collier, 39, has hitherto rusticated in Hampshire, England, now finds Virginia more suited for the cultivation of prose, verse and prize-winning flowers. But the label "whimsy" withers within ten feet of his pungent, multifoliate fancies.

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