Mixed Fiction

THE SHADOW OF MY HAND, by Holger Cahill (409 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $4.95), is a juggling act with four themes in the air at all times: 1) an epic of the soil, 2) a love story, 3) a study of an ex-G.I. reorienting himself to peacetime life, and 4) a rough-and-tumble western. Taking the empty-boxcar and hobo-jungle route, Cam Johnson, the novel's hero, beats his way back to the wheat-belt town of his childhood. Buffalo Coulee is Our Town on Central Standard Time, "a rundown county seat started by French voyageurs, half-breeds and Sioux . . . cut up into prairie lots by the boomers of kiting towns, now a farmers' market . . . but it was a world." To this world Cam brings not the ex-G.I. gripes of his bindlestiff buddies but pioneering grit.

Tilling another man's land, Cam finds his own roots. But he loses his restless heart to the boss's pretty young sister-in-law Millie. She is plagued by the memory of a previous affair, Cam by the bitter knowledge that he sits too far down the farmer's table to reach for Millie's hand. Their romance is not so much star-crossed as double-crossed, and Cam has to call on both his hobo and Pacific jungle lore to win an eye-gouging barroom brawl with his chief rival. Cam's and Millie's dilemmas are overwritten and underfelt. But in Minnesota-born Author Cahill's book, old nature, and not young love, is topic A, and for his evocations of a wheat field un der hail, the dancing fury of the summer sun or the polar malice of a prairie winter, he almost earns an A in writing.

THE LONG NIGHT, by Martin Caldin (242 pp.; Dodd, Mead; $3), drops a fictional atom bomb on a U.S. industrial town and morbidly watches the gory disaster work itself out. World War III comes to Harrington, U.S.A. with a touch of abracadabra-jabber at the air defense control towers: "Three. Multimotor. Low. One minute. Alpha Quebec Two Four Green . . ." This means enemy bombers. Author Caidin, a science writer, observes the beginning of the cataclysm through the little eyes of Henry Thompson, a jelly-spined civil defense map plotter who is quivering in his movie seat when the warning sirens sound. His wife is the first of 189,868 victims of the Bomb. As men, women and children are "lacerated into pulpy slivers," Thompson reaches his out-of-town civil defense headquarters but collapses there in a funk.

It doesn't really matter, because everything is in the hands of Colonel Buyers, a strong, silent type. In response to one Buyers order, a humane but misguided underling speaks up in a line of dialogue dear to a thousand movie writers: "Dammit, Buyers! . . . You're not God! There must be twenty thousand people trapped in there. They'll burn unless we get them out." There are at least 40,000, and the like of the fire that rolls over them has not been seen since David O. Selznick put the Technicolor torch to Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. As the victims race through the streets, they "topple and writhe in agony in the bubbling, flaming tar." But after four days and nights, the city of Harrington has the A-bomb licked.

The Long Night, like Philip Wylie's Tomorrow! (TIME, Jan. 18, 1954), suggests that, in their attempts to put atomic warheads into their imagination, novelists seem able to do little except pile horror upon horror. But the book serves a timely warning about civil defense; the nightmare it describes (though written in space-cadet English) is only too plausible.

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