Foreword
In this age when education is alleged to be more sophisticated and broader than ever before in history, author S. K. Mason offers us a novel that will surely stand our hair on end. He has courageously unfolded a tale of the horror and perversion plaguing some of America's institutions of learning, drawing on her own personal experience to authenticate and lend force to the plight of Allyson Carson, a beautiful twenty-three-year-old housewife whose average, middle-class morality is forever compromised.
Author Mason clearly demonstrates that not even academicians and their students can always escape the rapidly accelerating pace of life in the United States, and that there is no longer a steadied norm and sane rate of development and change in what Americans must do to stay apace of one another.
All the characters peopling this realistic work-from Allyson to Angus Cardwell, the unscrupulous school principal, a notorious bon vwant-are outwardly normal people, such as ourselves and our friends, and yet in truth represent that which is most shocking in every man's and woman's drives and desires. This, then, is a novel as much about us as it is the fictionally disguised characters in the text.
While the language of this book may cause some readers to recoil in indignance, we the publishers feel that the sensitive, enlightening atmosphere of the book is by far its most important aspect. Here is a work in which we can identify the best and the worst of the modern world in the courage as well as the depravity of many of its denizens.
Marriage, as it is today, is also a vital element dealt with by author Mason. We see, and better understand, some of the stresses and strains inevitably placed on even the most average, typical marriage when under assault by new dynamic forces in our society. More, we see some of the unusual methods of coping, not always successfully, with these intruding forces ... and how a marriage can be as easily devastated as strengthened and saved by our merely human responses to changing mores does not necessarily lead either to the doom or salvation of a relationship.
In closing, the publishers do not intend to instill fear in the minds of responsible, dedicated parents: rather, it is our intention to avail readers of the knowledge that nothing in the modern world is too strange to occur, perhaps where one least expects it.
And so we present The Principal's Office, one of the most remarkable literary achievements of this year.
-The Publishers Sausalito, Calif. July, 1974