Books: Macabre Novel

ALRAUNE—Hans Heinz Ewers—John Day ($5).

Without the conscious curdling of Edgar Allen Poe’s horrors, the dank fragrance of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, the legend of Dr. Faustus, certain music of Wagner, all the paintings of Felicien Rops, the word macabre would be impossible to define. In art the macabre appeals to Christian superstition, to an appetite for the unnatural caused by satiety with the natural. The girl Alraune was conceived by her father while he was being hanged by the neck. Her father and mother never knew each other. The mother was one who prostituted herself for fun, did not need her profits. Alraune was fated to bring great luck, death or destruction to all about her. She played with dice made from her mother’s bones, a dice box from her father’s skull. She led certain people to pull wings from insects, to stuff a frog’s throat with a lighted cigaret so that it was inflated with smoke and burst. She was sadistic, invulnerable, contemptuous, alluring.

When her foster-father died, Frank Braun became her guardian. His knowledge of her protected him against what was inhuman in her—the creature’s conception was, in fact, originally his idea. How Alraune awakened to humane feelings such as pity for her victim-conqueror, how she turned on him secretly at night with vampire’s teeth and which of them won their unearthly love-battle had better not be told, lest the author lose the effect of his gruesome tale.

Author Ewers, 58, began a varied literary career at 30. After helping Ernst von Wolzogen form a literary vaudeville troupe, Herr Ewers acquired his own vaudevillians, toured Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary. The Ewers shows were stopped by penury and the censor, so he went to the U. S., where he was interned during the World War.