If you don't own a copy, run out and buy one. Now. The stories are vintage Dread Empire, but should you be one of the lucky ones who has tracked down copies of most of these stories (two are new) you will want it for the Forewords. There's a main foreword, where Cook explains the Dread Empire Cycle he wanted to write and the novels rhat almost saw the light of day. He talks about the missing 'Wake the Cruel Storm' and how about 15% of 'The Wrath of Kings' survived - fragments of draft material that were misfiled so wasn't taken when the rest of the stuff vanished. How some of the stories (including a novelette that was to be the capstone for the series) were missing until the literary agency he used closed (on the death of the principle) and various papers were returned to him. Then there are the smaller ones - a paragraph or three - that appear before each story. Some merely describe where the story fits in the world (before this novel, after that one, etc) and a bit about how it was first published. Then there are the others... Finding Svale's Daughter where he talks about the folklore of Norway and a few early, never-to-see-the-light novels. Or for Ghost Stalk - where he points out that he tried to cobble the stories of the Vengeful Dragon together for a novel, but there were no takers (if there had been, that ship might be as famious as the Black Company is now). About how the illustration for Filed Teeth (found in Dragons of Darkness) had been late so ended up on the cover of the companion collection Dragons of Light. Castle of Tears reveals that Cook stayed a few weeks with Fritz Leiber at his two room appartment in Venice after the death of Fritz's wife in 1969 - Cook Castle of Tears, and Frutz wrote part of Swords Againt Death. We learn that Severed Heads is one of his favourite stories - partly because it's been reprinted so often that it earn him more than most of his novels had. Silverheels was written at the Clarion Workshop as a birthday gift for Fritz Leiber... The book is a treasure trove. Buy it. Read it.