Spook Department

FANCIES AND GOODNIGHTS (364 pp.)--John Collier--Doubleday ($4).

When it comes to spook literature, the English are still the best in the business, and this collection of short stories by Englishman John Collier is added proof of it. Unlike his fellow Englishman and spook specialist, Algernon Blackwood (TIME, Feb. 12), Collier does not deal in pure supernatural terror. His recipe calls for a good measure of spoof with the spooks, a grain or two of satiric strychnine and a dash of essence of Charles Addams.

In the story called Green Thoughts, for instance, a flower fancier is devoured by his pet orchid and converted into a huge blossom in his own likeness. In his new shape, he is recognized by a resentful nephew, and efficiently hacked to pieces by the lout, who rather enjoys the flower's screams. In Thus I Refute Beelzy, a father refuses to believe his six-year-old son's story that he has a secret friend named Mr. Beelzy, who won't let anybody hurt him ("He said he'd come like a lion, with wings on, and eat them up"). Father goes upstairs to give the lad a spanking. "It was on the second-floor landing," the tale concludes, "that they found the shoe, with the man's foot still in it, like that last morsel of a mouse which sometimes falls unnoticed from the side of the jaws of the cat."

In Bottle Party, a bachelor, browsing through an old curiosity shop, finds a bottle in which a jinni is stoppered. He buys it, and makes the poor devil work day & night to find him women. Yet the jinni somehow finds time to fall in love with his master's favorite, The Most Beautiful Girl in the Whole World. Puzzled by his mistress's indifference, the bachelor pops himself into the bottle where he keeps her to see if she has a lover there. While he is investigating, the jinni thumbs the cork back in, and takes over where his master left off.

Though Author Collier sometimes tries to point a subtle moral in his tales, he is not so much a moralist as an entertainer. In his own little department of the bizarre, he is as good as they come.

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