Book #4 for 2024. I said I would read this as a follow-up to Monster She Wrote and so I did. Something of a variable mixed bag, as you might expect; I will confess to struggling a bit through the first few stories, but as the volume progresses things pick up and on the whole I’d call it pretty successful. About two thirds of the stories come from the 1920s, with Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s two coming from the late 30s and Greye La Spina’s last three from the ’40s; interesting that La Spina gets five stories in here despite only being mentioned in passing in MSW, while the evidently enigmatic Eli Colter only makes one appearance, and not with the intriguing-sounding “weird western” described in that book. Everil Worrell completes the quartet, and she gets some of the more interesting stories in the collection cos they have science fiction elements; classically dubious early SF science, of course, but they give a certain additional flavour to proceedings (which can be kind of predictable at times, e.g. the revelation that a character in the last story, La Spina’s “The Antimacassar”, is a vampire is kind of telegraphed on the second page or so). Occasionally only historically interesting, but for the most part enjoyable stuff; another volume of this stuff wouldn’t go astray at all.
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