SOURCE: Collins, Bill. “The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield.” Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review 16 (July-August 1983): 54-5.

In the following review, Collins writes about Wakefield stories collected in The Best Stories of H. Russell Wakefield, favorably comparing the majority with works of M. R. James, but describing a few as pointless and anticlimactic.

H. P. Lovecraft offered the opinion (in Supernatural Horror in Literature) that “we must judge a weird tale … by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane part,” that “atmosphere is the most important thing.” Fair enough, but Lovecraft didn't write ghost stories, and in his own fiction, at its least mundane points, the reader has been prepared for the manifestation of the unnatural by at least a fragment of information as to the source or genesis of the horror, a fragment that often because of its incompleteness, involves us in...