[In the following review, Collins writes about Wakefield stories collected in The Best Stories of H. Russell Wakefield, favorably comparing the majority with works of M. R. James, but describing a few as pointless and anticlimactic.]

H. P. Lovecraft offered the opinion (in Supernatural Horror in Literature) that “we must judge a weird tale … by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane part,” that “atmosphere is the most important thing.” Fair enough, but Lovecraft didn't write ghost stories, and in his own fiction, at its least mundane points, the reader has been prepared for the manifestation of the unnatural by at least a fragment of information as to the source or genesis of the horror, a fragment that often because of its incompleteness, involves us in a way that either full knowledge or total lack of it would dissipate. M. R. James, who did write ghost stories, and was perhaps better at carving endless variations out of the restrictive structural model of the subgenre than anyone else, was usually careful to place just such a fragmentary hint of source early in his narrative, one unrecognized as important by the protagonist (but not by the reader) until Too Late.

All too often, however, writers of ghost tales content themselves with only minor variations on a structure that in essence can also (and better) apply to nonfictional accounts of investigation into supernatural phenomena: the protagonist, usually a convinced materialist, comes in contact with an object or a place, which begins to manifest inexplicable, usually threatening, properties; finally alerted to danger, he either escapes or dies; he, or a survivor, investigates the history of the place or object, and identifies some gruesome occurrence which has presumably imprinted itself on the surroundings. This structure works well in the memoirs of real-life ghost-hunters, as a kind of Whatdunit or Ectoplasmic Procedural. But its anticlimactic essence seems to me alien to the nature of fiction.

Such a story, Wakefield's first, unpromisingly begins this first collection of his writing since Strayers From Sheol (1961). … In “The Red Lodge” a financially strapped writer rents a country house for himself and his family. His wife has bad dreams; his son, a water-sports addict, refuses to go near the river; he himself watches spots of slime mysteriously appear on the carpet. A neighbor tells him that several unexplained deaths and drownings have taken place there over the years. After a night in which he lies awake psychically holding off “the Permanent Occupants,” and a morning of saving his son from drowning, he sensibly moves out. End. So what? The “atmosphere” Lovercraft requires is muted beyond any ability to frighten (perhaps a result of the “vitiating air of sophistication” Lovecraft found in Wakefield). There isn't even any hint of the source of the slime or of the “green Monkey” the child has seen.

A few other stories in [Best Ghost Stories of H. R. Wakefield] are of this pointless, anticlimactic kind: “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster,” “Day-Dream at Macedon,” and the posthumously published “Death of a Bumble-Bee.” Fortunately, the majority of his work here exhibits a more Jamesian (M. R.) approach. Predictability is not absent from three tales of ghostly revenge, “Damp Sheets,” “Immortal Bird,” and “Professor Pownall's Oversight,” a really elegant character study of a mathematician/chess player unable to cope with second place in either pursuit. “Look Up There” and “A Black Solitude” benefit from the reader's knowing things the characters don't, while “The Gorge of the Churel's” gives us a quietly chilling story of a smug Protestant minister menaced by non-Christian horrors he never perceives.

The remaining items demonstrate that Wakefield could do other things besides eternal ghost variation. “The Triumph of Death” is a nicely Jamesian (Henry) investigation of psychological horror in which the supernatural element is at best ambiguous. “Blind Man's Buff” actually benefits by its unexplained evil. Perhaps the best of the tales, “He Cometh and He Passeth By,” chronicles a duel between a villain obviously patterned on Aleister Crowley, and a protagonist whose best friend has been supernaturally slain by the Crowley-figure. Lovecraft would have made more of the protagonist's preparations, guided by an Oriental seer, for the climactic struggle, but Wakefield is convincing in his own way.

In sum, a book I can only recommend to those who know what they are going to be reading, and who can respond, as I cannot, to the basic ghost story structure too often repeated in a relatively short collection. The book is assembled chronologically, but the editor has given no dates of first publication or any other bibliographical information except for the titles and dates of (presumably) all of Wakefield's books, scattered through the chatty, disorganized biographical sketch that opens the volume.