[Abrahams is an American author and editor. Below, he considers the pieces included in The John Collier Reader to be engaging and enjoyable reading.]

It is twenty-one years—twenty years too many—since we have had a book from John Collier, and that, Fancies and Goodnights, a collection of fifty of his stories, was in considerable part drawn from two earlier collections. This is one writer, evidently, who is determined that his admirers won't suffer from a surfeit of his work. But twenty-one years are twenty-one years, and famished Collierites, not to speak of a new generation of readers who ought to be Collierites, will settle down happily with this new volume—and no matter that very little of its contents are, strictly speaking, "new." It brings together in a handsome format his novel of a sensitive and attractive chimpanzee who fell in love with her master and ultimately became His Monkey Wife, written at the end of the 1920s and redolent in its luxuriant style and whimsical ironies of that vanished epoch, and forty-seven of his stories, six of them in book form for the first time, and all of them elegant, mischievous, slightly sinister, and a source of continuing pleasure.

Anthony Burgess, in an enthusiastic introduction to the present volume, remarks that "people who read Irving Wallace and Irving Stone and the other Irvings may not be expected to read Collier," which is almost certainly the case, though I am constrained to add that there is at least one Irving (Clifford) whose misadventures might serve as material for a Collier story—suitably re-styled, of course. Burgess then goes on to balance the sentence and give vent to a grievance that Collier has been unduly neglected in serious quarters, complaining that "scholars who write about Edith Wharton and E. M. Forster may also be expected to neglect him." Again, very likely. But surely, what John Collier doesn't need—no more than do Saki, or Hans Christian Andersen, with both of whom he has noticeable affinities—are scholars to criticize, explicate, and interpret his work, but readers to enjoy it. I feel reasonably confident, judging by my own experience, that readers of Wharton and Forster, especially the latter, can become readers of Collier without feeling they are letting the side down.

This is especially true of the tales, in which the real and the fantastic most plausibly cohabit. The Devil is frequently on the scene—as, for example, in one of the best of the stories, "The Devil, George and Rosie," where he turns up in the Horseshoe Bar at the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, "a smart and saturnine individual . . . who had the rather repulsive look of a detective dressed up in evening clothes for the purpose of spying in a nightclub." This is Mephistopheles with a difference, and George Postlethwaite, the hero of the tale, is very much a latterday Faustus, "a young man who was invariably spurned by the girls not because he smelt at all bad, but because he happened to be as ugly as a monkey." What happens to George after he seals his compact with the Devil is his and the Devil's and also pretty Rosie's story; as in so much of Collier, it is the unexpected, yet inevitable, dénouement that counts.

"Story" is the operative word in any case, for Mr. Collier is always shamelessly and superbly the raconteur—to revive an old-fashioned word that seems appropriate to the occasion—who keeps us asking that most primiitive of questions, "What happens next?" and who is never at a loss for a sophisticated and irresistible answer.