'Return of the Sorceror' provided some genuinely creepy moments until the reason why the narrator has been employed by a nervous recluse in an old house is revealed and I think over-egged: I would have found it more unsettling if the "noises off" which the narrator kept hearing were really caused by oversized rats.
'Sadastor' is unusual in being a story told by a demon to cheer up a young lamia! 'The Death of Ilalotha' is a tale of the attractions of a woman, exerted sorcerously beyond the grave. In some respects, I found the stories less satisfying than those in volume 1, as some are a bit 'so what' such as 'The Last Hieroglyph' - the sequence of events play themselves out to a long foreseen conclusion, and I wondered why the god had seen fit to summon those characters to their ends prematurely. Only the middle section stories share a setting of Smith's: in this case the mythical land of Hyperborea. These stories are less linked by their setting than in volume 1 and instead an attempt has been made to group them by theme, such as 'Judgments and Dooms'. This collection of short stories is part two of a reprint of the first collection of Smith's work, published by Arkham House in 1941.
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