[In the following review, the critic examines the works included in The John Collier Reader, concluding that much of Collier's canon is charming but light reading.]

We may still believe in God—our money and our pledge of allegiance say we do—but few nowadays believe in Satan. True, we can muster up a pharisaical contempt for antisocial behavior; we can generate a proper Republican shudder at breaches of law'n'order; and of course any sexual naughtiness still provides a spasm of titillation or moral indignation (which T. S. Eliot said is “the favorite emotion of the middle class”). But despite the current bumper crop of public and private evil, no one could make even an election issue of it, recently.

This is regrettable—not merely for moral or political reasons, but for esthetic ones. “The death of Satan was a tragedy,” Wallace Stevens observed, “for the imagination.” True indeed. Evil in art, which had always been primarily human, became merely human and then became mere error, maladjustment, environmental deprivation … or it was sentimentalized and glorified by such as Genêt. Perhaps only in the writings of Nabokov, now, is evil occasionally to be found pure. John Collier has glimpsed it, however; evil flickers in and out of his best stories.

His latest collection [The John Collier Reader] is distinguished by the inclusion of the fine novel His Monkey Wife—which is about precisely that—as well as 47 of his short stories. Their basic style might be described as that of a perceptive, educated and witty Wodehouse:

Edward deposited his bags in Mergler's Hotel, which stands opposite the funeral parlor. After a minute or two, he stepped outside and checked up on the signs.

“Why, you low-down, snooping bastard,” she began, and the conversation continued with the utmost vivacity.

His material is obscured too often by obsolescent theological equipment—angels, devils, meaningful coincidence, the supernatural, etc.; but at his best Collier deals in sharply observed psychological evil, the evil that men intend toward one another … or, more often, that men and women intend toward each other. His treatment of the subject is characteristically brief, elegantly stylized and comic; he persuades us not of the reality of his tale, but of the probability that real men and women might feel and do such evil things. When read in heaps, the stories tend to display their machinery rather immodestly, but as a Christmas gift, a bedside book, this book is fine; and His Monkey Wife is a wonderfully sustained feat of imagination.