One short novel -- The Green Millennium -- and four short stories in a collection called Night Monsters. To make things confusing, there was another collection called Night Monsters 10 years later that is substantially different.

The novel and one of the short stories -- The Casket Demon -- are throw-aways in my opinion. The Green Millennium )1953) is like Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe, racing pell-mell through a number of scenes in an oddball future (the early 2000s of course), with cartoonish characters, including a nebbishy hero with a skeevy peeping tom habit that pretty much sours things for me. The short story The Casket Demon (1963) is similarly under-developed. A starlet has a curse that causes her substance to slowly fade away if she is not constantly in the public eye.

The other three stories though are worth hunting for either version of the Night Monsters collection. The Black Gondolier is a Lovecraftian tale, where the Earth's oil is the source of unthinkable horror. But that skeleton is not what makes this story great. The story opens with "Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the cage La Negra Gondola on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St Mark's Plaza." The next three pages unwrap this sentence to unveil where Daloway really lives. And that's just the beginning of a love poem of sorts to the bizarre histories of Los Angeles. Midnight in the Mirror World (1964) is a classic Stephen King tale published a decade before Carrie. A man walking between two facing mirrors in his house at midnight notices that the repeating images are not the same -- in the 8th one a shadowy figure is place its hand on him. The next night, this is happening on the 7th image. What both does and does not lead where you expect. Excellent horror and more. Finally, "I'm Looking for Jeff" is a classic ghost story, but one that might actually scare you, so well is the tension gradually ramped up.

So The Green Millennium, not recommended. Of the two versions of Night Monsters, this is fine, though the British version of Gollancz or Panther are better since they omit The Casket Demon and include The Girl with the Hungry Eyes. ( )

This is my firswt conscious reading of fritz leiber's work (I say conscious as I may have read him as a child or teen). It is too Elizabethn, drawn out, without clear form. The imaginatikon of the plot and characters makes it readable, but Leiber doesn't do "twists" very well, and, as aforementioned, bores the reader so he or she is ready to give up the ghost well before the spectres begin to appear. ( )