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The Monster
(From dust jacket)
The strage talent that produced "Let Thy Moon Arise" here offers, in the guise of a novel with modern instances, a half-comic, half-horrifying allegory of a power-worshipping materialistic world.
The progress of Jonathan Crisp, salesman of vacuum cleaners, is not, like the pilgrim's, a battle with the forces of evil. It is a struggle for power and still more power--such power, perhaps, as we have seen attained in our time by a paranoiac paper-hanger.
Jonathan's familiar spirit is his model vacuum cleaner, personified as Tantalus. To Tantalus all the world's a dustheap, just so much dirt to be devoured. Like dirt become people to Jonathan. When he hawked Tantalus from door to door they humiliated now they must be devoured--all of them, the pious, the idle, the industrious, the chaste, the dissolute. It is his revenge on society and his triumph. His megalomaniac ambition culminates in an attempt to come to terms even with God--in his eyes, no more than the super-salesman.
On its own plane there is harsh realism in this story and, contrastingly, the gayest humour. Both qualities serve to underline its serious purpose.
The strage talent that produced "Let Thy Moon Arise" here offers, in the guise of a novel with modern instances, a half-comic, half-horrifying allegory of a power-worshipping materialistic world.
The progress of Jonathan Crisp, salesman of vacuum cleaners, is not, like the pilgrim's, a battle with the forces of evil. It is a struggle for power and still more power--such power, perhaps, as we have seen attained in our time by a paranoiac paper-hanger.
Jonathan's familiar spirit is his model vacuum cleaner, personified as Tantalus. To Tantalus all the world's a dustheap, just so much dirt to be devoured. Like dirt become people to Jonathan. When he hawked Tantalus from door to door they humiliated now they must be devoured--all of them, the pious, the idle, the industrious, the chaste, the dissolute. It is his revenge on society and his triumph. His megalomaniac ambition culminates in an attempt to come to terms even with God--in his eyes, no more than the super-salesman.
On its own plane there is harsh realism in this story and, contrastingly, the gayest humour. Both qualities serve to underline its serious purpose.
217 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1944
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