Thomas, Dylan | Richard F. Peterson (essay date 1986)

Richard F. Peterson (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: A review of Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 206-8.

[In the following review of Thomas's Collected Stories, Peterson believes Thomas could not sustain longer works of fiction.]

In “Where Tawe Flows,” one of twenty early stories in the first group in The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas, a young Mr. Thomas and three friends are collaborating on a novel of provincial life. While the others concentrate on getting the “realism straight” for their characters, Mr. Thomas pleads for the fantastic. Rather than working on his contribution to the novel, he has spent the week writing the story of a cat that turned a children's governess into a vampire by jumping over the governess at the moment of her death.

The first twenty stories in Collected Stories are also a plea for the fantastic or at...

[The entire page is 972 words long]

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