[H. H. Holmes was a pseudonym of William A. P. White. White was an American critic, science fiction writer, and co-founder of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Below, he offers a positive assessment of the stories in the collection Fancies and Goodnights, citing their skilled narrative technique, imaginative force, and excellent prose style.]

Any reader who has ever read so much as a single story by John Collier needs to be told nothing beyond the facts that this volume contains over 170,000 words by The Master: all of the twenty-four stories in Presenting Moonshine, nine from other sources and seventeen stories never before published in book form.

The indoctrinated have already stopped reading this review and departed for their bookstores, each to buy two copies for himself (one will wear out so soon) and innumerable extras as appropriate presents for Christmas and Walpurgis Night. For the few readers who remain, however, it might be wise to explain why some of us feel for Collier an idolatry surpassing that of O'Hara for Hemingway and approaching that of Shaw for Shaw.

Collier's stories are very short; these range from 1,200 to 8,500 words, and average around 3,500. They are concerned almost exclusively with the improbable, the impossible, the outrageous, whether it be supernatural, criminous or erotic. And they are written with a combined dexterity of narrative technique, a force of imagination, and a precision of prose style.

It is possible that the more sober judges may decree that these dazzling jeux d'esprit are not literature; if that is true, so much the worse for literature. Fortunately there remain readers who would gladly sacrifice the entire contents of any annual collection of top stories for one such story as that ultimate variant on the basement murder, "De Mortuis"; that incomparable revelation of the nightly horrors of department stores. "Evening Primrose"; or that completely unclassifiable phantasmagoria, "Night! Youth! Paris! and the Moon!"

Turn to page 259 and try this last, if you've never sampled Collier before. Then try the closing story, the shortest, simplest and possibly best of all, "The Chaser." From then on, I trust, you are lost. You will forgive Mr. Collier anything, even his few conventional commercial stories, even his surprising ignorance in one story of the noble art of stud poker; you will come to realize that each Collier story is better on second reading, better yet on third. Then you will note the exactness of the mots justes which elude your memory; and you will agree that Mr. Collier, like one of his own characters, has produced a "four-star classic .. . thrilling enough for the most hardened low-brow, and so perfectly written as to compel the hommage of the connoisseurs"—a wondrous book, the like of which has not been seen since the death of Saki.