[In the following review, West finds the stories in The Devil and All to be well written but shallow.]

Mr. John Collier's The Devil and All reveals him as master of the art of saying, with consummate skill, almost exactly nothing at all. These six short stories are a demonstration of accomplishment and dexterity to be compared to the performances of a champion trick skater. His prose glides and turns, pauses and pirouettes, leaps and wheels, and in general does the nicest tricks with unfailing coolness and precision. Seldom is even a comma misplaced, and the screech of an unnecessary emphasis (as the italicization of “human” on p. 31) is so rare as to remain a blemish upon the prevailing perfection. And, like many of the best performers, Mr. Collier prefers a strictly artificial rink; if thin ice cannot be altogether avoided, at least he will run no risk of tumbling through it into authentic depths. He chooses to write of the Devil, it is plain, not because he believes but because he does not believe in him. It amuses him (Mr. Collier) to outfit Hell with every modern inconvenience because he is quite certain he will never go there.

The individual tales touch varying depths of hellishness. In one we encounter nothing worse than a nice young modernist poet. In a couple more two would-be suicides score off, in one case the Proprietor himself, in the other a distinctly peevish subordinate. In a fourth an infernal hobbledehoy takes a very long while netting his game—or, more appropriately, as the reader will learn, his ball; the moral of this story might be that patience is a virtue even in devils. The next also shows, but more usually, Virtue Triumphant in Hell's newest suburb. Paradox enters again into the sixth, which tells how an angel may win, even though a little lower than the devils! Heaven, it appears on balance, can still hold its own. But Mr. Collier might just as well have made it the other way, had the whim taken him. As the Devil himself retorted when asked why the damned should spend eternity in a dance lounge, “Why not?”—the more so in view of the revelation that the universe is, anyway, no more than a pint of beer. That is the humour of these admirably printed but rather too ornately bound stories; it is also their limitation.