At their best, which is very fine indeed, Rhys Davies's stories [in The Best of Rhys Davies] achieve a hard, self-contained robustness; lean, spare and direct they move relentlessly towards their endings…. His art, like all accomplished art, shows no signs of struggle or agony; the vision is captured easily, in familiar surroundings as natural as conversation and as unnerving as ghosts. For he was haunted by the voices of his native Wales, its countryside, its manners and its people; deformed by chapel hypocrisies, liberated by circuitous contact with a pagan past, his characters flourish in the privacy of their own lives…. His imagination transformed the actual into the bizarre, for in his stories the conventional and the ordinary come at the reader from strange and unexpected angles of experience. To show his wit and his intelligence he laces his malice with humour and his compassion with derision...