A Core of Fear

HORN by D. Keith Mano. 337 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $5.95.

If Dante were alive today, he might well add another circle in the lower depths of his Inferno. Inhabiting this new pit of horror would be the warring Negro leaders of Harlem and the meddling white man who tries to understand them. It is just such a journey into hell that D. Keith Mano, a white author, describes with Dantesque fervor in his second novel, Horn.

Mano's narrator is Calvin Beecher Pratt, a timid, fat, white Episcopal priest who leaves a cloistered, scholarly life to take over a crumbling empty church in the imagined Harlem of the 1970s. There Pratt becomes inextricably involved with an anti-white Negro organization called the Horn Power Movement and its dynamic but tormented leader, George Horn Smith. Middleweight champion of the world, orator, professed illiterate and economic genius, Smith is a man possessed of a freakish protuberance--an eleven-inch horn jutting from his forehead.

Despite his improbable appendage and his charismatic leadership--he combines traces of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver--Smith as a character is most extraordinary for his recognizable human qualities and frailties. Behind Horn Smith's power and hatred there is a person who desperately needs the recognition and sympathy even of a self-consciously inadequate white priest. Yet the fact that Pratt and Smith somehow strike up something that can be construed as friendship is remarkable. The unusual results of their mutual "needs" raise the novel above the level of an otherwise purely allegorical tale of ghetto politics.

Pratt is subjected to all sorts of torments. He is psychologically humiliated at an anti-white Horn Power demonstration and is badly beaten up by a deranged Episcopal priest, whose own congregation, at Horn's command, has deserted him for Pratt's church. At a floor-by-floor, six-story orgy staged by Horn, Pratt is exposed to blatant homosexuals, naked prostitutes, hallucinatory drugs. Then one of Horn's co-workers and antagonists threatens to blind and castrate him. Finally, the cowering priest is coated with pitch and thrown naked out into the streets. There at last he is rescued by Horn, who expresses an almost sadistic pride in Pratt's endurance of these humiliations--as if Horn were God putting Pratt as Job through a test of his dedication.

His body burned free of all its hair, Pratt's mind verges on madness. Though he has survived these trials, Pratt still lives in fear and trembling of Horn and his apocalyptic world. And in the end, when someone attempts to kill Horn, it is Pratt who tries to protect him. Secluded in the bowels of Pratt's church, where Horn has maintained a secret hideout for years, the two men finally reveal themselves to each other. Pratt has always been a misfit--he says--though he does have the courage to admit his fears and weakness. Horn emerges as a dabbler in medieval studies and essentially a moderate leader, doomed to be destroyed by more brutal and extremist forces. These exchanged confidences, however, offer no comfort.

Pratt reports to his superior: "I've learned that I do not, cannot, understand the Negro people. That's what I've learned. And by learning it, I've learned some few things about myself." The measure of understanding that might keep black men and white from brutalizing each other is the real subject of Mano's perceptive if bizarre parable. It is the fear in the hearts of both races that Mano sees at the core of a deadly contest in this inner circle of a contemporary hell.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.