[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 pyrotechnics of style revels in sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, in the startling use of words which gives them a new significance, a new life. Mr. Collier's gift of style is a real one, without affectation.

But about the use to which Mr. Collier puts that natural gift one cannot say as much. The affectation of striving for bizarre effect, of twisting situations into unreal contortions, Mr. Collier does with a sort of satanic glee.

Willoughby, the hero of his Misadventures of a Heart, is the son of a Lord Ollebeare, a rake of the old school, and his cook, who was “so exceedingly honest … that when she ran away with a lawyer's clerk … she could not bring herself to take the principal gift of Lord Ollebeare's bestowing, but left it in his bed awaiting him, that he might sleep the warmer for it, if not perhaps as dry.”

Willoughby was supported unwillingly by his uncle, who rarely saw him, but oftener than he cared about the sight. The boy was reared by his uncle's butler and his uncle's rather exotic library, and when at 20 he was hurtled into the world as secretary to a stuffed owl with a pretty and amorous wife Willoughby's equipment for life was by no means adequate.

Mr. Collier takes his hero through every phase of London life, including one which is so deliciously funny that the reader wonders why it has not been exploited in just this ribald fashion before. Willoughby, in revolt against pharisaism, takes up the cult of Dostoievsky, and his adventures in self and human immolation are funny beyond words. Mr. Collier can do supreme irony when he will. But somehow always Willoughby remains a lay figure upon which Mr. Collier can drape superb sentences and bizarre ideas. He never emerges as a human being who has an existence (as the heroes and heroines of all great novels have) within himself.

The really fine characters of literature (fine in the sense of being works of art on the part of the author, whether hero or villain) achieve a reality greater than one's next door neighbor. They live. The neighbor dies and is forgotten. Willoughby never lived.

And it's too bad, because Mr. Collier's gift of making words sing and dance, and gambol, and glow with sunshine, and drip with dew, is a major one.