KING'S INDIAN

Midnight tales for the literary intellectual — which, you will rightly observe, could mean almost anything from Mensa-level insomniac pastime to serious brooding. All suggestions apply here, and all at once, for Gardner's subject is imagination, and this is a much more complicated study now than when Poe and Coleridge gave it their go. Gardner has read Poe and Coleridge — probably all their commentators too, and he has read the phenomenologists and seen Twilight Zone: the issue is no longer anything so simple as telling the true from the false, if that is even a valid distinction. It is enough now to tell what is what, and Gardner seems to be animating some such proposition in his games of style, mystifying us in the modern sense of the word as he plays with themes that are classically mysterious — demons, magic, mad-science, things that are, like art, contrary to nature. Stories of spiritual menace are almost satires, but their ironies do not settle and neither does their rather unpleasant humor. Quasi-fables of the quasi-political frog-queen Louisa seem most concerned with the artist's power in the worlds of his devising, power Gardner wields as if he'd just been sprinkled with pixie dust; but the action itself is a tease. And the parody of the title extravaganza goes farther — beginning with the Ancient Mariner and extending to everyone who ever associated a boat with deep psychological states, ghosts, the macrocosm — inviting reams of inference about the social reality of literary imagination while insisting repeatedly that it is all just high bunkum — though it may be brilliant. . . .