Prolific and imaginative if also occasionally repetitive and predictable, Dennis Wheatley is noteworthy in the history of dark fantasy for his treatments of sorcery and black magic and for his distinctive combinations of literary types, resulting in supernatural spy stories and thrillers and in historical horror novels. He is also important for his painstaking work as an anthologist; many readers of horror and weird fiction in Britain and the United States were introduced to these genres through Wheatley's massive collections, such as A Century of Horror Stories (1935). So strong was his influence that Keith Neilson, in a chapter on modern horror fiction in Neil Barron's Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide (1990), calls Wheatley the most important British horror writer in the period between the world wars, despite the fact that such work comprises only a fraction of his considerable output.

Over the course of a career that spanned more...