Publisher's Weekly
Despite the misleading title, the stories here have little to do with either dungeons or dragons and nothing whatever to do with role-playing games. Rather, the idea behind this anthology is to bring together obscure short pieces (30 in all) by mostly well-known fantasy writers. Thus the contribution by Robert Bloch has never before been reprinted from its 1939 pulp magazine appearance, and John Collier is represented by a 1935 tale that has not appeared in any of his collections. Perhaps necessarily the quality of the stories often falls short of what we have come to expect from these writers. Nevertheless, it is pleasant to discover new work by old favorites, and there are some good ones to name a few, John Wyndham's ''Murder by Proxy'' is clever and well-written, Fritz Leiber's ''The Glove'' is genuinely creepy, and Algernon Blackwood's ''The Magic Mirror'' has a charming Damon Runyonesque quality. There are also contributions by Bram Stoker, Sax Rohmer, John D MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, Robert E Howard, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, among others.