As the shades of Edgar Allan Poe falls across 'The Ravages of Spring' John Gardner's tale of a crazed scientist in a great dark house who has learned to reproduce himself infinitely, so the voice of Herman Mellville can clearly be heard in the 'King's Indian', the ancient mariner's hypnotic yarn of a fiendish hoax on board a ghostly Nantucket whaler...the Kafkaesque story of the mysteriously absent prison warden heard pacing behind locked doors, and three mock fairy-tales of mad Queen Louisa who secretly prefers life as a toad..of a priest who is loosing his faith only to find others have greater need of it than he, of a wild, exuberant Irish painter who transformed the lives of his friends and of a righteous monk subjected to diabolical temptation. Exulting in the moods and manners of foregone masters, John Gardner is ..a writer of outstanding originality. The flow of audacious and startling ideas, the beauty and precision of his language, the sheer power of his story telling.