drink described as “liquid fire” and to keep his soul from hell.

In “After the Ball,” a hulking, brutish demon, desperate to join hell’s “Infernal” football league, must capture a soul for his would-be team to kick around; he goes after an upright bachelor whose rectitude leads the Devil in a hellish dance until the would-be victim’s marriage; then the wife’s greed and infidelity do what the fiend never could alone: damn his soul.

Pictures in the Fire

The title story in Pictures in the Fire, depicts Hollywood as the center of contractual arrangements with the Devil, a Hollywood agent selling the souls of his clients in film options, and a finicky actress so distracting that the Devil himself fails to renew an option for a soul. In “Bird of Prey,” the Devil is a monstrous bird who spawns an equally monstrous offspring, whose vocal imitations lead to domestic malice and damnation. “Hell Hath No Fury” depicts what happens when a fallen angel and a humanized fiend become roommates and what types of men they attract. “Fallen Angel,” in turn, demonstrates the power of psychological jargon and Freudian analysis to transform angel to housewife and the foulest fiend into a “tailless” boring Wall Street success. Such stories call attention to the number of Devil/hell/fire related expressions, such as “damn and blast you,” “a devilish situation,” “hellishly dull,” “carry you to Hell for tuppence,” “fought like a demon,” and “getting on like a house on fire.”

The last two tales in the Devil set fit in with another common Collier concern: the effects of women on innocent mankind. Many (but not all) of Collier’s women are obsessive, selfish tyrants or greedy, sexually driven manipulators, whom The New York Times critic Thomas Lask describes as “predatory, blood-sucking, life-throttling and generally plain nasty.” Even when they are more positive figures, they have disturbing, disruptive effects on poor males. In other words, there is a misogynistic edge to many of the stories. “Sleeping Beauty” is among the most negative of the lot. In it, an educated young man of erudite diction, charmed by a beautiful but sleeping young lady in a carnival act, spends a fortune to buy the act, pay off despicable relatives, and hire a medical specialist to revive her. Her awakened persona, however, is that of a rude and vulgar slut, whose every word grates on sensitive ears and who is only ravishing when returned to silent slumber. Mrs. Beaseley, of “Incident on a Lake,” is a domineering tyrant who destroys her husband’s happiness at every opportunity but who is finally done in by an even more beastly creature than she. The innocent-seeming beauty of “If Youth Knew If Age Could” is really the corrupted plaything of a rich old man.

“De Mortuis”

Collier’s husbands murder wives or vice versa. In “De Mortuis,” a doctor repairing his basement floor learns of his young wife’s lascivious behavior from sympathetic male visitors who think he has murdered her and approve; when her return seems to confirm his newly aroused suspicions, he cements her corpse in the cellar. Readers hear only his sweet invitation for her to see his handiwork in the cellar; all the rest is implied. The horror of the tale comes from the speed with which an educated and presumably human doctor accepts the hearsay evidence of rude, bragging bumpkins and acts on it, without even providing his wife a chance at rebuttal or defense. In “Back for Christmas,” a henpecked Dr. Carpenter miscalculates his wife’s fanatical obsession with control and efficiency and finds his carefully contrived and seemingly perfect murder exposed, while the husband in “Three Bears Cottage,” angered by his wife’s seemingly selfish choice of the better eggs for herself, plots to poison her with deadly mushrooms only to discover that her “generosity” makes his plan backfire (and frees her to run off with a man waiting in the wings). In “Over Insurance,” a negative version of O’Henry’s “Gift of the Magi,” two lovebirds find that the costly purchase of insurance to benefit the one or the other in case of sudden demise leads to poverty, unhappiness, selfish obsession, and double poisoning.

“A Matter of Taste,” “The Chaser,” “Little Momento”

“A Matter of Taste” follows a traditional detective format as members of the Medusa Club discuss exotic means of murder and a consulting pathologist to the Home Office relates a famous murder case in which a husband, suspected of having given his wife poisoned chocolates, has actually made chocolates so appetizing that she ate herself to death. The short classics “The Chaser” and “Little Momento” are masterpieces of understatement. In “The Chaser,” a murder in potencia depends on the naïveté of the young lover who expects romance to endure statically forever and to remain pleasurable, in contrast to the knowing cynicism of the apothecary who understands that change is essential and that unchanging, overpowering love can lead to boredom and hatred. In “Little Momento,” a seemingly kindly old man, showing off his peculiar mementos reminiscent of past romantic indiscretions and domestic crimes in his neighborhood, actually provides his listener a motive and a plan for murder and himself a new memento to show off to future visitors.

“The Lady on the Grey”

“The Lady on the Grey” is a bit of a turnaround for Collier, for its males are Anglo-Irish womanizers who, together with their ancestors, have deflowered the peasants of their county for more than three centuries and who finally get their comeuppance from a queenly ghost who transforms them into wretched curs. In “Without Benefit of Galsworthy,” a foolish retired major, a pukka sahib, gives up everything, his wife and children, his club and job and reputation, for a servant girl, who, upon finally being informed of his passion, refuses to have anything to do with him (he blames her refusal on the “bloody Bolsheviks”), while in “Think No Evil” an unreasonably jealous husband keeps throwing his wife and best friend together, hoping to find evidence of her infidelity, until, after a number of years of such forced encounters, they do finally succumb, but, just as he is ready to murder them for their suspected acts, innocently reveal the unexpected recentness of their passion.

Fancies and Goodnights

Collier describes his Fancies and Goodnights as “a continuing blunder toward an arbitrary, surrealist way of expressing things,” and some of his grimmer fantasies are indeed surreal. Most memorable is his “Green Thoughts,” in which a hybrid orchid, among the effects of a friend who died mysteriously while on expedition, proves a deadly carnivore, consuming first the family cat and then family member after family member. A profligate young nephew, however, who recognizes his family’s faces amid the strange new buds of this rapidly growing plant, proves even deadlier, for the plant simply acts out of its nature in a passive, plantlike way, whereas the nephew’s animal instincts make him nasty and vengeful. The final line of this tale is vintage Collier:Among fish, the dory, they say, screams when it is seized upon by man; among insects, the caterpillar of the death’s-head moth is capable of a still, small shriek of terror; in the vegetable world, only the mandrake could voice its agony—till now.

“Evening Primrose”

Another surreal tale is “Evening Primrose,” an odd account of the secret and monstrous world of department store mannequins and the dropouts from the real world who move among them and are ultimately destroyed by them. Told by a poet who seeks sanctuary from urban headaches and finds the love of another longtime dropout, the story has the flavor of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers in that it exposes the conformist attitudes of such department store creatures of the night, their distrust of social dissent, and their reliance on “Dark Men” to transform human outsiders into manageable mannequins.

“Gavin O’Leary”

On a lighter yet equally fantastic note, “Gavin O’Leary” traces the career of a sensitive flea, who absorbs into his nature the characteristics and personality of whatever person’s blood he imbibes. As long as he is down on the farm, he is a well-adjusted creature, simple and content, but when the blood mixture becomes too heady during a romantic film, Gavin, the flea, imbued by his host’s passion for a glamorous screenstar, becomes devoured by love for the actress and is not content until he reaches Hollywood and rests in her bosom. Her obsession with an egocentric male star, however, induces the same obsession in Gavin, who, now a performing Hollywood flea star, begins to reflect the decadence, egotism, and homosexuality of his new host (affecting “violet evening suits,” “epicene underwear,” and scandalously “strange parties” in Bel Air). Only a leap to the breast of a successful actress whose self-love assures his contentment saves him from the perversions of most Hollywood elite.

Cruelty, Vanity, Greed

Stories about human cruelty, vanity, greed, indifference, and the strange obsessions associated with these characteristics abound. Particularly disturbing is “The Steel Cat,” in which an inventor develops a silly contraption which he believes is a superior mousetrap and relies on a pet mouse of whom he has become very fond to demonstrate its virtues; however, the sadistic industrialist whom he tries to interest in marketing the invention plays on his greed to force him to let his pet die in the trap and then leaves with no intention of marketing such a product. In like manner, the bullheaded American businessman in “The Invisible Dove Dancer of Strathpheen Island” becomes obsessed with possessing what he thinks is an elusive beauty who is rejecting his suit and ends up wringing the neck of the creature he pursues. In “Midnight Blue,” a wife previously dominated by her husband and children assumes the family power when she helps her husband cover up a murder he has committed. Then in “Wet Saturday,” an entire family conspires to cover up a lumpish daughter’s murder of a wished-for suitor and to place the blame entirely on an innocent and close family friend, who accidentally walks in on the crime. In “Ah, the University!” a stingy father who forces his son to study to be a cardsharp instead of a university student bets his fortune in hopes of a big win but leaves his winnings when he misunderstands his son’s winning ploy, a ploy that will finance the son’s university education.

The Supernatural

Sometimes in Collier’s fiction, the supernatural or the absurd infuses a common vice with extra pique. In “Old Acquaintance,” a jealous husband is obsessed with his belief that his wife, who has in reality just died of pneumonia, is running around town with an old rival, whom he finally learns died months before. In “The Frog Prince,” when a young lady’s fiancé announces that he plans to marry an overweight moron instead because of the value of her dowry, the jilted lady disguises herself as a man and courts and marries the moron herself. Later a medical miracle dispels the fat to reveal “a lean, agile, witty, and very handsome man” with whom, after a necessary role reversal, she lives quite happily. “Seasons of Mists” concerns bigamy, deception, and betrayal. In it, a young man falls in love with identical twins and, deciding he must have both, marries them both under the guise of being himself a set of identical twins. Then, when marriage brings boredom, he becomes his own rival and persuades each of his wives to cheat with his supposed brother; their imagined betrayal stirs his jealousy and destroys his marriages.

Collier attacks Hemingway-style artists in “Variation on a Theme” and “Collaboration.” The writer in “Variation on a Theme” adopts a gorilla to help him instill the primitive in his efforts. Ironically, the gorilla, impressed by the author’s clever stylistics, secretly trades novels, only to find his own a literary success and the true artist’s work rejected as obscene, seditious libel. “Collaboration” focuses on a stylist who requires an infusion of he-man life experiences to make his books salable but who must pay the price of his wife’s infidelity for his artistic success.

Surprise Endings

Collier takes pleasure in surprise endings or unique, unexpected twists. His stories often end with an amusing moral, such as that of “Halfway to Hell,” which concludes that girls who “play fast and loose with the affections of small men with blue eyes” may “find themselves left in the lurch,” a disturbing transformation (the would-be arsonist in “Great Possibilities” becomes head of a fire brigade), or a stinging truth (the lifelike dummy created for a ventriloquist act in “Spring Fever” seems more real than its creator). At other times, the reader is left to imagine the horrors to come, as at the end of “Bottle Party,” when a rowdy, sex-starved ship’s crew “unstopper” a genie bottle at sea and find a duped male instead of a beautiful female genie: “Their disappointment knew no bounds, and they used him with the utmost barbarity.” Sometimes there is an expected reversal, as in “Are You Too Late or Was I Too Early.” In this story, a man who falls in love with a spirit who moves on the edge of his consciousness discovers that perhaps he is the spirit who haunts her. At other times there is a telling revelation. “The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It,” which first appeared in A Touch of Nutmeg and More Unlikely Stories, for example, concerns a man acquitted for murder because of a lack of evidence, but more particularly, a lack of motive; the story ends with a final statement that reveals to his kindhearted listeners, the readers, and the speaker himself the obsessive and unexpected motive which compelled his hideous deed.

A number of Collier’s tales hinge on a confusion between animate and inanimate, human and inhuman, with mannequins being taken for humans and humans for mannequins, with fleas, pigs, plants, cats, and gorillas behaving in human ways and humans behaving in subhuman ways. Sexual conquest, infidelity, and narcissism lead to comedy, obsession, and murder. Lovers hide in trunks, pose as stuffed trophies, and reduce themselves to absurdity in a variety of ways. Humans struggle for eternal youth, while sickness, old age, and death catch them unawares. Vulgar commercialism replaces older values. Appearance belies reality, and reality fades into a hazy mist filled with apparitions; evil and good are difficult to separate; and life is an ironic joke with a trick ending. Only ordinary people with no pretentions win sympathy for their plight.