Dr. Henry N. Riddle, Jr., New York brain surgeon on the way home from a failed surgery, is forced to approach this chilling story again and again, attacking it from every angle in hopes of making sense from the improbable nightmare he’s become a part of. Young millionaire Inis St. Erme and his fiancee Elinor Darrie started off in a borrowed car to Vermont to elope, and on the way picked up a shady-looking hitchhiker known only as Doc, or “Corkscrew” because of his odd gait and twisted corduroy trousers. Later, the young couple decided to hold a sun-set picnic on a dead-end road in rural Connecticut, overlooking Dead Bridegroom’s Pond. That much is known. Also well-known is the aftermath of Corkscrew’s rampage, where he made off with the car, struck down the half-Indian John Flail, ran over the Wiggins’ St. Bernard, killed St. Erme and made off with his dismembered right hand. What Riddle can’t figure out is why. What caused this gory rampage? Why hack off St. Erme’s hand, and where did it go? And, most of all, how did he escape from a dead-end country road, when Riddle himself had the only exit blocked all evening while working on his stalled-out car?Thus begins an ethereal thrill-ride that will make modern thrillers blanch, an elliptical take on the psychological thriller that also plays by the Golden Age mystery rules of fair play. Reading The Red Right Hand is like waking from the dreamlike haze of a concussion, only to find yourself in a chaotic nightmare where up is down and down is death and everything is working to unsettle the reader. The prose casts a beautiful spell, intoxicating the reader in lush atmospheric and a vocabulary that flaunts every inch of Rogers’ origin as a poet. The writing is a pseudo-stream-of-consciousness style that owes as much to Henry James and William Faulkner as it does to Bierce’s “Incidence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.” And there are no chapters, so the book flows on like a torrential river; you may realize this too late, when you’re already swept into its hold and have no choice but to ride it out to the end.The Red Right Hand is a hypnotic and illusory stew of key elements: constant repetition of motifs and themes, the power of Roger’s impressive vocabulary, a gripping opening sequence and gruesome murder, a pace both breathless and unstoppable. It is unrelenting, one of those books that you really ought not to put down until you’ve picked its bones clean and sucked out the marrow. It is a unique and brilliant experience, a thrill-ride of murder and mayhem and mystery second to none. There’s really nothing else like it out there—or if there is, please tell me about it. In the superb introduction, Martin Edwards mentions that Rogers was “appalled” that this would be the novel he is remembered by. But there are far worse books to be remembered for, and few of them are as vivid or—well, perfect, as this one. An intoxicating, ethereal thriller told in an oblique stream-of-consciousness style. One of the most unique and haunting Golden Age crime novels. Not to be missed.