Collier, John - Fanny Butcher (review date 22 September 1934)

Fanny Butcher (review date 22 September 1934)

SOURCE: Butcher, Fanny. “Collier Writes with Brilliance in New Novel.” Chicago Daily Tribune XCIII, no. 228 (22 September 1934): 15.

[In the following review, Butcher offers high praise for Defy the Foul Fiend despite Collier's lack of development of his protagonist.]

John Collier, whose His Monkey Wife was one of those lodes of pure brilliance which is rarely found in the good mines of English literature, and upon whom the eyes of those who would like to feel themselves his peers have been turned with eagerness, recently offered us Defy the Foul Fiend, which proves—to this reviewer, at least—one of the most difficult of books to judge.

First of all, and probably more obviously than anything else about it, the style in which Mr. Collier writes is so dazzling, so blindingly brilliant, that it is hard to see the stars for the fireworks. The reader who likes...

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