[In the following essay, Theroux discusses Collier's place in literary tradition.]

The critical reaction was mixed in 1931 when John Collier's first novel, His Monkey Wife; or, Married to a Chimp, was published by Appleton. Books called it “an extraordinary first novel” and The Boston Evening Transcript said it was “unique and thoroughly entertaining satire.” The Nation regretted that it was not so deft as David Garnett's Lady Into Fox; The New Republic said there was in it “less humor than artifice” and The Spectator concluded that it was “a good dish spoiled in the cooking.” There was, even in the reviewers' praise, a great deal of shy euphemism. But that is understandable—after all, it is the story of a man who copulates with a chimpanzee, and monkeyshines of this sort still have the power to shock.

In his appreciative introduction to this Collier anthology, Anthony Burgess stresses the kind of embarrassment “serious” readers and scholars feel in the presence of a writer whose fantasies are almost plausible; who bears a passing resemblance to Saki and Mervyn Peake, but who otherwise belongs to no literary tradition; who was a marvelous scriptwriter (Collier wrote the scenario to The African Queen), the author of privately printed books containing the publicly unprintable; who had Osbert Sitwell as a supporter and the experience of what was most strange in two countries, England and America, to draw upon; a creator, Burgess says, “of very wayward miniatures.”

Collier described himself (on the dust-jacket of Full Circle, 1933) as “indistinguishable in appearance and pursuits from any other country bumpkin.” The available facts of his life are few. He was born in London in 1901; he wrote poetry and published it, was interested in John Aubrey, and apart from the two novels already mentioned and Defy the Foul Fiend, published four collections of short stories: Presenting Moonshine, Fancies and Goodnights, The Devil and All, and The Touch of Nutmeg. At some point, perhaps in the late forties, he went to Hollywood and worked in films. He is still very much alive, and if Burgess is right in saying that he “eschews fame and has a horror of publicity” it is easy to predict that Collier will be horrified before long, for this reprint will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the happiest literary events of this year.

The persuasive part of the otherwise extremely bizarre His Monkey Wife—the eternal triangle with a chimpanzee as its hypotenuse—is the character of Emily, the monkey. She is sensitive, witty, resourceful and fairly glows with personality. The humans in the book look rather pale beside her, and if the book has a message it might be that, observed by a chimp, the jaded twenties types are the true apes of God who need a simian redeemer. Emily arrives from Africa as Alfred Fatigay's gift to his fiancée. Fatigay's name deserves no further comment. As Emily is taken through the chartered streets of London she is “struck by the appearance of abject misery which was apparent in all the passersby, especially in their sickly complexions, their peevish or anxious looks, their slave's gait, and, most of all, in their rare and rickety smiles.” Emily longs to be married to Alfred, but Alfred is engaged to the empty-headed social climber Amy for whom Emily works as a domestic. To complicate matters further, Amy gives a party and invites all her artistic friends, and as Emily serves drinks (and is nearly seduced by a guest), Amy finds herself a second admirer. Meanwhile, Alfred is accosted by a female who is charmed by his “too thrilling Conrad-sort of background.”

But the marriage between Amy and Alfred goes on. Emily, however, is named as bridesmaid, and in a series of tricky maneuvers which includes an edition of Poe open to “Murders in the Rue Morgue” Emily shows up heavily veiled in the bride's dress. Without anyone guessing—for the monkey has a physical similarity to Amy—Alfred is married to his lovestruck pet. Recriminations follow. The monkey finds all of it tedious and soon both she and Alfred are wandering the streets of London, left to their separate fates. Some time later, and after Alfred has a vision of the Congo in Picadilly Circus, he spots Emily at the Ritz and they compare tales. Emily has risen in the world, Alfred has fallen; they live together for a while and finally decide to return to Africa. It is there, in Boboma, where we first saw the pair, that their love is consummated in the last remarkable paragraph of the novel. Alfred cries, “My love!”

Under her long and scanty hair, he caught glimpses of a plum-blue skin. Into the depths of those all-dark lustrous eyes, his spirit slid with no sound of splash. She uttered a few low words, rapidly, in her native tongue. The candle, guttering beside the bed, was strangled in the grasp of a prehensile foot, and darkness received, like a ripple of velvet, the final happy sigh.

There is not a little misogyny in the tale, but it is such a wickedly cheerful kind it is irresistible. “Behind every great man there may indeed be a woman,” says Alfred to the newsmen covering his departure, “and beneath every performing flea a hot plate, but beside the only happy man I know of—there is a chimp.”

Collier's next novel, not included or even mentioned in this anthology, was Full Circle, a futuristic look at a tribally divided England in the year 1995. It is as savage and gloomy as His Monkey Wife is witty and fantastical, and concerns an expedition to capture women from a neighboring settlement. On its publication it must have had the effect of scaring the daylights out of readers who had laughed so hard at the farcical coupling of Emily and Alfred. Still, The John Collier Reader is a hefty volume and contains over 50 stories, from the Saki-like tales featuring Willoughby, to the stories of explicit horror which have been identified with Collier's name. There are many murders, many devils—even the Devil himself—and there is a joyful balance about the stories that is uncommon in the macabre. A nagging wife is eaten by a megatherium (“Incident on a Lake”), a man is entombed in a bottle (“Bottle Party”), a cheery neighbor is made into a murder suspect (“Wet Saturday”), a refugee in a department store is sadistically transformed into a window dummy (“Evening Primrose”). Some of the most horrible of his stories have what you might call happy endings, and all have perfectly direct openings which seize the reader's attention. “The Devil George and Rosie” begins, “There was a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls, not because he smelt at all bad, but because he happened to be ugly as a monkey.” That is a Faustian story, and in fact many of the stories have as their pivot the Faustian bargain.

Literary scholars have largely ignored the horror story as an art form, and this might account for the profusion and diversity of the macabre tale. Think about it and you come up with W. W. Jacobs, Elizabeth Bowen, all of Shirley Jackson and some L. P. Hartley, James's “The Turn of the Screw,” Stevenson's “The Bodysnatchers,” Saki's little frights and of course John Collier's comedians doing evil things. What do such writers have in common? Very little, one would think, apart from their fascination with the hard-to-prove and their command over readers' feelings. It seems to me that the writer of nightmares, caring little about his place in literary history, seeks only the sympathy of an imaginative reader, whom he will ply with horribly pleasurable detail. It is art deliberately acting upon a person's emotions and stopping just this side of outrage. John Collier is a master of this art, and he has the added advantage of being very funny, the author of ironies “so perfectly balanced,” the late Basil Davenport said, “that his horror is hardly ever quite free of humor, nor his humor of horror.”