"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" is a minor work by a major writer…. [It will interest] any reader sympathetic enough to Plath's work to have read most of it already and to be interested in foreshadowings, cross-references, influences and insights…. [It's a prose catch-all] and as such it ought to round out one's knowledge of the writer and, perhaps, offer some surprises. Luckily it does both….

It was a shock akin to seeing the Queen in a bikini to learn that Sylvia Plath, an incandescent poet of drastic seriousness, had two burning ambitions: to be a highly paid travel journalist and to be a widely published writer of magazine fiction…. To this end she slogged away in the utmost self-doubt and agony, composing more than 70 stories, most of which were never published, and filling notebooks with the details of what she thought of as real life...