As we’ve said before, we rarely read reviews before buying books (as if you couldn’t tell from some of the lemons we pick up) because we think they usually give away too many plot points. But we do sometimes unavoidably run across them. We saw a review of Geoffrey Household’s 1964 novel Arabesque that was so rapturous we took to the auction sites. How could we not read this guy? We found a pair of Households, of which we considered The Adversary the throw-in, the one you must buy to get the other. We placed him in line behind books we already planned to read, and later when his turn came mistakenly thought it was The Adversary we were eagerly anticipating instead of Arabesque. The eye-catching cover art you see above (uncredited) probably had something to do with the error. So into The Adversary we plunged, and if Arabesque is a better book we’ll be surprised.

Originally published in 1968 under the poor title Dance of the Dwarfs, with this retitled edition from Dell coming in 1970, The Adversary is basically a game hunting novel, but a step above. It’s told in epistolary form, fronted by a prologue telling readers that the author protagonist, field agronomist Dr. Owen Dawnay, was found dead in his compound in the desolate Colombian jungle, murdered by communist guerrillas. As a prologue it’s Lovecraftian in spirit. Then we get to read Dawnay’s diary, which tells about local legends of frightening forest dwarves glimpsed dancing in the darkness by farmers and Indians. Nobody has ever investigated—the common wisdom is to lock one’s doors and windows at night. Dawnay takes an interest, and during numerous increasingly dangerous excursions on horseback and foot into the jungle, learns what’s behind the legend.

Colombia had been an independent country since the early 1800s, so while Household’s tale has the feel of colonialist fiction, it has few of the key aspects, particularly the misplaced assumption of ownership over others’ lands. Dawnay is a foreigner, never truly to belong, and understands that. With his scientific mind, he’s a potential upsetter of local ways, but in other areas embraces them. He takes on a young female companion, Chucha, and their relationship, both sexual and intellectual, grows important in the narrative. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. Household gives you this beautiful gem: What islands we are! I doubt if any woman understands the deep loneliness to which men condemn themselves. They think it a moroseness and that our silence in some way disparages them as inferior creatures. We are merely away. The business of the island is briskly proceeding, but all around it is sea and no boat. Women cannot ever accept that there is no boat.

The book’s rear cover blurbs use phrases like “almost painful to read,” and “ultimate horror.” We would say instead that The Adversary is highly suspenseful and relentlessly builds a sense of encroaching danger. Often in horror novels dread derives from something that’s first unknown or formless, then as the shape of the threat becomes understood, the dread tends to diminish. The best authors are able to compensate. In Household’s hands, the question of what brought about Dawnay’s end—guerrillas or some other thing—seems solved when the identity of the dwarves becomes known. The dread dips for a bit, but returns strongly when we see that solutions may actually be impossible. It doesn’t truly qualify as a horror novel, in our view, but it’s very nice work (made into a terrible 1983 movie starring Peter Fonda and Deborah Raffin). Now on to Arabesque.