MixedBoston Review... a grab bag of forms, and its range reveals a writer given to experimentation. Eugene B. Redmond must be commended for his dogged 35-year dedication to the manuscripts that Dumas left behind at his death ... Given that the Dumas archive has already been so deeply mined, it is surprising to discover here a vein that was waiting to be tapped—seven previously unpublished stories, at least one of which (\'Scout\') is among Dumas’s finest ... Unfortunately, what Redmond has not given us, perhaps since Dumas had no chance to organize his papers and reveal such things, is a historical account of Dumas’s trajectory as a writer. The stories are organized along chains of thematic resonance—a set of Arkansas stories is grouped together, for example—but not in any kind of chronological order; there are no notes to document where a story first appeared in print, no notes to explain which tales were written in the early ’60s and which were written later (although most of the stories set in New York City feel very much post–Watts riots). And the stories themselves, running the gamut from visionary science fiction to well-wrought tales that end in Joycean anticlimax, do not offer up a clear sense of before and after. A sympathetic reader might say that the organization of Echo Tree reveals the open-ended nature of Dumas’s quest rather than any particular sequence of his solutions. But reading Echo Tree cover to cover is a disorienting experience; one is tossed from genre to genre without much sense of direction.
