Suspense & Horror

The Midnight Patient, by Egon Hostovsky (Appleton-Century-Crofts; $3), is a spy thriller about a psychiatrist who gets involved in a plot to blow up New York City. Blowing up New York, of course, is an idea that comes to everybody in the big city sooner or later, but Author Hostovsky has worked off his urge with uncommon ingenuity. The analyst is asked by a U.S. secret agent to examine another agent who has suddenly lost his nerve on the eve of his biggest assignment. For $20,000 the doctor agrees to treat the man every midnight. All at once the analyst does a rushing (or is it Russian?) business at his office. After 278 pages of analytic questions and seductively couched replies from female operators, the poor analyst is almost ready for the crazy wagon himself. Good nervous stuff to wake up a sleepy weekend. New York, incidentally, still stands firm at book's end.

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (Gold Medal Books, paperbound; 25-c-). When Robert Neville's wife finally died in 1975, he refused to carry her body to the huge, burning pit into which other victims of the mysterious disease had been dumped. Instead, he buried her secretly. That night there was a fumbling at his door: it was his wife, come back to drink his blood. For she. like the others, had become a vampire. This embarrassing domestic crisis (he eventually drives a stake through her heart) is only one of the milder episodes in I Am Legend. Every night the vampires gather outside Neville's barricaded house, howl and gibber--for he happens to be the last man in the world. Among the callers is a charming young lady vampire who looks at the whole thing with a new, vampire morality (a kind of relativism), and to her, Neville with his stakes is a foul murderer. Sure to satisfy the specialized clientele who like their blood running hot and cold.

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