You might recall my delight earlier this month when the NYTBR assigned the new Hannibal novel to Terrence Rafferty, their all-too-infrequent horror critic. Well, last weekend they delivered the second installment of Rafferty's column. As we noted the last time this column came around, nobody else at the Review is covering mass-market originals, and very few of its contributors are writing with his full-on verve about any type of fiction. Here, for example, is Rafferty on horror writer Bentley Little:

"In a sense, his whole career—16 previous novels and a short-story collection—has been an elaborate self-conducted anger management program, from which he has yet to graduate. The Burning is just the latest in a series of Little novels in which boiling-mad victims of one social injustice or another set out to redress the wrongs done to them, and go way too far. And in all his books the writer appears to be working extremely hard to keep his sympathy for these angry devils from getting the better of him. In every novel, he maintains a running auto-critique, heckling himself like a drunken doppelganger in the audience, with the invective intensifying noticeably as the act nears its conclusion."

Admit it, even if you can't stand genre fiction, reading that description makes Little sound awfully darn interesting, doesn't it? Heck, last week Lee Siegel churned out how many thousands of words about Norman Mailer, and he didn't make him sound half as compelling as that.