Chain of Evil: The JournalStone Guide to Writing Darkness, by Michael R. Collings, approaches the question of writing from multiple directions. The essays in this volume range from the abstract and philosophical to the concrete and specific; from reminiscences as they relate to the art of writing to near-scholarly studies of the nature of genre, in particular horror; and from general discussions of literary forms and what they can achieve to practical advice on where to place commas, exclamation marks, and quotation marks. Dr. Collings' expertise emerges from nearly thirty years teaching...

C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy: Essays in Genre is not an encyclopedic scholarly treatise. Nor is it a dissertation-style researched tome, with as many pages of endnotes as there are pages of discussion. It is instead an example of "reader-response criticism"-almost everything in this book stems from my reactions as I read the trilogy...for the first time some forty years ago and again during the multiple times I have since reread the books, singly and as a cohesive whole. It concentrates on three forms to storytelling-Fantasy, Myth, and Science Fiction-because they have proven the most valuable...