Knowing what became of her it is difficult not to read Sylvia Plath through a ready-made filter. Having said that, there is enough darkness and foreboding in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams to at least hint at what was to later transpire.
Perhaps more than anyone else, the legend of her life is what dominates one’s consciousness.
I suspect without that mythology this collection might never have been posthumously published (even though many of the individual stories were published contemporaneously in magazines and the like). A small number of the stories are clearly juvenilia (written before she was 21) and it appears were not seen in print in her lifetime. They read as such too. As for the rest?
Well for this reader at least the cloud of her tragic suicide hung too low over the volume for me to enjoy it. That and the fact I really struggled with her style; were she still alive and writing prose today I wouldn’t be tempted to venture back in. One for the Plath fans I think – though they will already have read it of course…
Ian Gouge - Writer 