Bones of the Moon

Another "trip" by Carroll (The Land of Laughs, Voice of Our Shadow), this time leading to a nighttime fantasyland called Rondua. Cullen, a bright young Manhattanite with charm to spare, is wallowing in abortion guilts when she writes a letter to Danny James, a widower and basketball player with even more charm to spare, who promptly boards a plane in Italy and flies to Manhattan to solace her (it was not his baby she aborted), then marry her and fly back to Italy where he's playing ball. Soon Cullen is in heaven, pregnant again - and then Danny's knee is mashed and they return to Manhattan. Their apartment house there also holds Alvin, soon to be a teen-aged ax murderer who writes strange letters to Cullen from jail after he chops up his mother and sister on the floor below the James'. And soon Cullen is having weirdly lovely nightdreams, which she pops into her notebook. Rondua is peopled with tremendously outsized but benign animals, toys, and a boy named Pepsi, with whom Cullen is to collect "the bones of the moon" in her serial dreams. Pepsi turns out to be her aborted son, and Rondua is haunted further by Jack Chili, who rules Rondua's dark side with his own set of bones, and like Alvin the Ax is ready to kill those he loves. Cullen's dreams at last break into her daytime reality - and Pepsi, Cullen and Jack Chili have their showdown in Cutlen's real-life apartment. Carroll's greatest successes here are with lovable characters, not with his plot - and then only with the characters from real life, not those from psychedelic Rondua - which lacks a sufficiently felt imagination, some kind of tactile sting, so that it's hard to care about human problems amid its burgeoning symbols. (Kirkus Reviews)