This is a preliminary review. I've only read three of the stories in this collection. Have had the book for years -- long enough to not be able to remember why (outside of it being an Arkham House product, and I was way into H. P. Lovecraft as a teen) I bought it.

If you have ever wondered what the phrase "purple prose" was trying to describe, read Shiel. August Derleth apparently really liked Shiel's style, and they were friends ... but hoo! boy. The style, knotted, convoluted, over-emotive and crushingly multisyllabic, often (for this reader, anyway) obscures exactly what it is Shiel is trying to convey ... and on the evidence of the first three stories in this volume, what he's trying to convey -- in terms of plot at least -- is not really ... all that. So is the style a compensation of sorts for the not-quite-stunning-originality of the plots? I don't know yet.

UPDATE: thought about adding a star, since the story "The Dark Lot of One Saul" has some sentences in it that are ... well, quite beyond belief. So that's good. And there are other moments (see "The Bell of St. Sepulcre," where the weird woman first appears, and bits of "Huguenin's Wife") of real power that make one wish that Shiel had been more in control of, and less at the mercy of, his stylistic choices. Without fail, however, these moments of power are balanced by moments like the one in "The Tale of Henry and Rowena" when, to further the plot, the titular characters encounter a damned PANTHER in Rome, and Henry is compelled to CUT OFF HIS OWN ARM AND FEED IT TO THE PANTHER so they can escape ... and without this patently ludicrous moment, the story would not ... be.

Perhaps the saddest instance of the obscuring curtain of style (I did note that Shiel often indulges in swathes of alliteration and assonance, which makes me wonder if he was a fan of Anglo-Saxon poetry!) is the story "The House of Sounds." This, according to H. P. Lovecraft, was doubtless Shiel's masterpiece -- and I tell you what, I can make little of it. The best I can manage is that it is some wack *inversion* of Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," and it is not saying much to say that it suffers badly in the comparison. I am not sure what HPL saw in this story -- but then I guess he can't really be trusted as a critic of style, since his own was often ... pretty dire.

And there you have it. I had to check the brute 'monetary value' of the book -- since it's an Arkham House volume I was wondering whether it had any collectible value -- but it doesn't, really, so it will probably exit my collection since I don't feel much impulse to read these stories again. Alas. ( )