Fancies and Goodnights


Fancies and Goodnights is a collection of fantasies and murder stories by John Collier first published by Doubleday Books in hardcover in 1951. A paperback edition followed from Bantam Books in 1953, and it has been repeatedly reprinted over more than five decades, most recently in the New York Review Books Classics line with an introduction by Ray Bradbury. A truncated British edition, omitting roughly one-quarter of the stories, was published under the title Of Demons and Darkness.
The collection is viewed as a classic of its genre. It won the International Fantasy Award for fiction and an Edgar Award for "outstanding contribution to the mystery short story." It compiles most of the stories from Collier's prior collections as well as seventeen previously uncollected stories, several original to the volume. Collier reportedly rewrote many of his early stories prior to book publication.

Contents

  • "Bottle Party"
  • "De Mortuis"
  • "Evening Primrose"
  • "Witch's Money"
  • "Are You Too Late or Was I Too Early?"
  • "Fallen Star"
  • "The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It"
  • "Three Bears Cottage"
  • "Pictures in the Fire"
  • "Wet Saturday"
  • "Squirrels Have Bright Eyes"
  • "Halfway to Hell"
  • "The Lady on the Grey"
  • "Incident on a Lake"
  • "Over Insurance"
  • "Old Acquaintance"
  • "The Frog Prince"
  • "Season of Mists"
  • "Great Possibilities"
  • "Without Benefit of Galsworthy"
  • "The Devil, George, and Rosie"
  • "Ah the University"
  • "Back for Christmas"
  • "Another American Tragedy"
  • "Collaboration"
  • "Midnight Blue"
  • "Gavin O'Leary"
  • "If Youth Knew, If Age Could"
  • "Thus I Refute Beelzy"
  • "Special Delivery"
  • "Rope Enough"
  • "Little Memento"
  • "Green Thoughts"
  • "Romance Lingers Adventure Lives"
  • "Bird of Prey"
  • "Variation on a Theme"
  • "Night! Youth! Paris! and the Moon!"
  • "The Steel Cat"
  • "Sleeping Beauty"
  • "Interpretation of a Dream"
  • "Mary"
  • "Hell Hath No Fury"
  • "In the Cards"
  • "The Invisible Dove Dancer of Strathpheen Island"
  • "The Right Side"
  • "Spring Fever"
  • "Youth from Vienna"
  • "Possession of Angela Bradshaw"
  • "Cancel All I Said"
  • "The Chaser"

Reception

Anthony Boucher reviewed Fancies and Goodnights favorably for The New York Times, saying "the very best short stories of murder of this or almost any other year appear as a minority in a volume chiefly devoted to superlative supernatural fantasy." Time also reviewed the collection positively, declaring that "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." P. Schuyler Miller praised Collier as "one of the great individual talents in the modern literature of fantasy and the macabre."
Everett F. Bleiler characterized Collier as "One of the modern masters of the short story... fine stylist, remarkable wit and ironist, obviously influenced by 18th century models," but noted that Collier's "extensive" rewriting and revision of his earlier stories "tend to tone down the language, with some loss of exuberance and zest."