[In the following review, Ferguson finds the stories in Presenting Moonshine enjoyable but superficial.]

John Collier in his short stories has opened up a vein of fiction that comes strangely in this time. All his pieces [in Presenting Moonshine] are in this same manner—which is not, incidentally, the more humane and engaging manner of the two novels: His Monkey Wife and Defy the Foul Fiend. They are matter-of-fact in tone, smoothly joined in the writing, and deal in one way or another with the supernatural. I don't like them. They are clever and at times brilliant; they start where Poe leaves off, without ever quite achieving the memorable effect of the occasional Poe success. It is perhaps wrong to speak of them as being in any vein, for there is no blood in them; they are about everyday things in New York or London and as far away as Jules LaForgue or Patagonia. Their restraint and humor and well breeding in the presence of the clammy grotesque must inevitably suggest an exercise, controlled and deliberate; and I don't like them.

There is a fascination, though, as of rare deep-sea creatures and the life under a damp flagstone, and this sort of life beneath life is exquisitely cultivated. There is the case of the man-eating orchid which assimilated a household; there are the night shapes of life after death in the society of department stores, with the ghost-eating Black Men from the night life of undertaking parlors; there is the dim clerk who died for love of a store-window dummy; there are old men with magic bottles and a best-selling gorilla; there are even some complicated heterosexuals, though oh so faintly. There are a few stories where death or worse is neither present nor foreshadowed—one a good satire on the phony exquisite as writer, one a pretty threadbare exercise in smug innocence betrayed, etc. The devil appears and also justice, especially in the case of the man who became known in the East as the man who laughed at the Indian rope trick. Every young woman for whom the young man of the story would sign away his life is exactly as ravishing in every catalogued proportion, and as completely a blank, as the young ladies of P. G. Wodehouse; and in fact I can think of no character that can be remembered except by what happened to him.

This is all cabinetwork of fertile imagination, a craftsman's skill, and delicate and costly woods. As such you may enjoy it thoroughly, though, as I said, it has not that extra power of the grotesque in literature which can make sleep hazardous and eating a debatable proposition. The truly striking thing about it is its urbane presence in this time, its end unto itself and apparent success with a fairly wide magazine audience. This is the man from the other side of a century or the man from the moon, but perfectly among us and easy in a dinner jacket.