The Fag Hag from Hell … elevates the collection into the realm of something truly special.
The first Obverse Iris Wildthyme collection was received very well, and so The Panda Book of Horror had some expectations riding on it. It seems, over all, to have lived up to them: the book has 4.31 stars on GoodReads, 4.75 on LibraryThing, and a rating of 8.9/10 on the TARDIS library. Nick Mellish called it “another sublime collection from Obverse Books: long may the high quality continue.”
Philip Purser-Hallard – no stranger to Iris or Obverse – said Obverse had built on the success of its predecessor and created a book where “none of the stories are less than splendid”.
At GoodReads, Mel said “I think this was [the] best [Iris Wildthyme] collection I’ve read so far”, and Vivienne called it a “very enjoyable selection of short stories”. Richard Wright was less impressed, expressing the concern that as characters Iris and Panda can too easily cross the line from strange and come across as just plain silly. However, he did highlight The Fag Hag From Hell as one of the stories that did work, even if it was partly because it focussed on a character other than Iris.