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 should transcend human limitations and enjoy a god-like expansion of experience. But Mr. Hecht is, I believe, an honest explorer and reporter of this realm of consciousness. As a matter of fact, his Fantazius attains no experience. He attains no freedom. He becomes the beaten and bleeding slave of an amorphous demoniacal deity, which he recognizes as the horrible enlargement of his own lusts. He has left man in his "maggotism," to find the superman only a magnified maggot.

"Humpty Dumpty" is not a fantasy, but a striking psychological novel. It is "Erik Dorn" done over again, and better done. That means, essentially, that Mr. Hecht, with greater mastery of expression, with sharper psychological scrutiny, and with unabated passion for telling the truth, has given us once more a brilliant picture of his own type of mind and of his mind's adventures with other minds, messed up in bodies which interest him only so long as they excite his mind. The hero of this book, Kent Savaron, is a novelist who has read what Mr. Hecht has read and has reacted to his reading as Mr. Hecht has reacted. He conceives himself to be a superior emancipated intellect, belonging to a little group outside their age, who look upon the procession of humanity as a foolish pageant which concerns them only for amusement and derision. Ordinary mortals he regards with ineffable contempt as swine in sties. When he has to deal with them, he loathes them to the point of murderous hatred; he wants to kill them, thinking that is all they are fit for. Whether by love or hate, he is uncertain, he is attracted to Stella. He marries her as a step in an egotistical debate with himself, and partly for the savage pleasure that he feels in cutting