BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

FOREST FIRE, by Rex Stout, Farrar-Rinehart, New York,

1933.

Stan Durham, by force of his strong, silent personality, has become a respected leader in his western state Forest Service. His wife Elsie respects him but feels him a virtual stranger. Beyond a few rounds of intercourse just after their marriage, resulting in a semi-idiot son, their relationship has been sexless.

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One summer, Harry Fallon, charming, handsome young fellow, with a college background, takes a job under Stan in the Forest Service. Stan is quickly, almost reluctantly won over by Harry's radiant charm, from the moment Harry puts his hand on Stan's knee on the train. From happygo-lucky Harry, Stan takes presumptuous acts and gold-bricking on the job he wouldn't put up with from anyone else and repeatedly gives him another chance and another.

Enter a pair of schoolteachersone, thirtyish but attractive Dot Fuller, is drawn to Harry, and makes a big impression on him. Stan finds himself strangely annoyed by this, and tries to rationalize his jealousy, not overlooking the possibility-as he puts it in the local parlance-:

He was no cross-eyed bull. He shied away from that, but pulled himself back to it again, for it was a respectable conjecture he was scrutinizing. He had heard many

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of the forest and prairie epithets and phrases and jokes regarding intimate physical relations between men, or between men and boys, but knew nothing whatever of the actual facts on which they were based. He was aware that to most men there was something both shameful and funny about it, but to him it was much nearer the one than the other; he wasted neither words nor thoughts on anything so entirely outside of his life. He knew that a cross-eyed bull was a man who was supposed to be unable to distinguish for certain physical purposes, between a woman or a boy, or, able to distinguish, preferred the boy.

Dot determines to lose her virginity to Harry, but nothing much happens even when they are alone for the night. As Harry tries to explain, he's great at building up to dramatically desirable situations, but seems to fail at the critical moment to bring them to actuality. Stan assumes the worst, tells Dot off and leaves in a huff. Shortly after, Dot accidentally starts a fire, which soon has the whole area ablaze.

Harry joins the fire-fighting, and is killed. Stan. after his usual able fire-fighting efforts, discovers the body, and is grief-stricken. Somehow deducing that Dot started the fire, he stalks her to the lonesome cabin determined to do away with this foul female who has robbed him of both

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