[Humes is] one of the least-known and most enigmatic members of his writing generation....

[His] are rare books in the best sense, great feasts and fiestas, and my reencounters with them have convinced me that in the raw instinctual days of early recognitions my admiration for Humes’ writing was not at all misplaced. I recommended them at nineteen because I found the books thrilling in ways that I could not at the time explain. Today, in my late forties, I find them just as thrilling, and in 
addition I can offer a few ideas as to why.

The Underground City stands as one of those rare birds of American fiction, a true novel of ideas that never lacks for credible characters and a powerful realistic plot. Humes divides the book into three large chunks, and by the way in which he sets his scene, with a vast canvas of cloud and sky on the opening of the day above Paris about a year or so following the end of W.W.II, he seems to have nothing less in mind than the desire to create a monumental story of epic range...
...we encounter a broad cast of characters and become engaged in a masterly setup for a dramatization of the world of modern Western geopolitical affairs. Just as the trial will rip open the wounds on the French body politic still fresh from the war, the large central portion of the novel gives us the narrative of Stone’s undercover work during the war—a dense, dramatic novel with the novel that may be the best story of the Resistance told by anyone in English.... 
Humes’ treatment of the military and political aspect of the events would have alone been brilliant enough, but he underlays these public matters with the burning psychology of personal motives, stories of lost sons and troubled fathers...

There is, too, a philosophical level to the book, the presentation of a number of warring philosophies of history and politics, from the fated notions of the ambassador on through the paranoid psychohistorical theories of the Communist manipulator Picard (which, as critic James Bloom has recently pointed out in a brief note on Humes, perhaps the only critical notice that the book has received in the thirty years since its publication, portends the now-fashionable strategies of paranoiac fiction as exemplified in the work of Thomas Pynchon.) Moreover, there is a rich mythological overlay to the story, beginning with the ambassador’s descent from the heavens at the beginning of the book on through the central return back in time to the years of the Resistance in the Stone Resistance narrative, as well as a lot of seeming counterparts among various characters to figures out of European poetry and myth, including the physical descent into the underworld of the sewers made by Stone (“Dante”) in the final section of the novel.

If The Underground City appears deceptively at first look to be one of those loose and baggy monsters of which Henry James complained, the compactness of Men Die, published less than a year later, might give the initial impression of simplistic story-telling about a complex period, the months leading up to the US entry into the Pacific War. The Underground City seems almost wholly anomalous in its essence, a work that no other American writer tried to write before Humes...

It’s unclear to me why neither of these novels is now in print, except that perhaps when Humes himself went, in his own way, “underground,” there was no one else partisan enough to lobby on behalf of further editions. Taken together they not only give us a picture o the Cold War mentality that augments the dramatic vision in Mailer’s Barbary Shore and Vance Bourjaily’s Hound of the Earth, but show the hand of a writer whose inventive projections and first-rate narratives deserve to see the light of day again. The books are good enough to become part of the education of all the good readers in the house.

Both novels have been out of print now for over 40 years; both are coming back into print in the Modern Library in January, 2008.