At their best, which is very fine indeed, Rhys Davies's stories [in The Best of Rhys Davies] achieve a hard, self-contained robustness; lean, spare and direct they move relentlessly towards their endings…. His art, like all accomplished art, shows no signs of struggle or agony; the vision is captured easily, in familiar surroundings as natural as conversation and as unnerving as ghosts. For he was haunted by the voices of his native Wales, its countryside, its manners and its people; deformed by chapel hypocrisies, liberated by circuitous contact with a pagan past, his characters flourish in the privacy of their own lives…. His imagination transformed the actual into the bizarre, for in his stories the conventional and the ordinary come at the reader from strange and unexpected angles of experience. To show his wit and his intelligence he laces his malice with humour and his compassion with derision. His spite is reserved for the absurdity of the human situation. "Nightgown" shows the influence of his friend D. H. Lawrence in a story of the hard peasant/miners and the gentle woman struggling to assert a little of life's tenderness; "Canute" has achieved something like classic status as the drunken Rowland fails to hold back the rising tide in the Gentleman's Convenience; and "The Chosen One" remains a fine study of murderer and victim, the victim imperious and in control.

These dozen stories … demonstrate something of his range, variety and imaginative power. Although the stories are structured narratively, that is, each tells a story, the interest is not primarily narrative but arises from the alchemy of character, the conflict of situation, the contrasts of young and old, new and traditional, simple and complex, present and past. His art and his craft are dazzlingly matched. (pp. 197-98)