This is a nice, wide-ranging overview of the fantastic in literature (covering fantasy, horror, the weird tale, etc.). It's basically a long-form essay broken down into different approaches, periods and countries - the extra space is filled with some vintage illustrations and paintings from all time periods.
In some sense, there wasn't much here I didn't already know (except some of the more obscure European writers, which the international section is indispensable for). The opening has a nice discussion of what constitutes "the fantastic" and differing critical definitions (and how the fantastic differs from, or includes, horror, surrealism, magical realism, etc) - a strong overview.
But what was nice was reading some well-informed criticism that was actually *critical* (if a little blunt and unsupported, due to format and length considerations). In this age of the internet, criticism ends up being juvenile, uninformed snarkiness ("Dude, this was borrrring, but then I was drunk, so I went a played HALO instead... Goatsey forever!") which is essentially useless OR well-meaning, mealy-mouthed and lazy "I only review things I like", which leads us to the dreaded, but easy, world of "if everything is good then nothing is good". Even the next level of standard criticism up from those two bases is equally as dire, but real informed criticism (yes, even informed criticism you don't agree with) is a dying art in the world of everything-is-subjective personal experts that arose after the internet made us all genius gods overnight.
So it was enjoyable to read a writer in the 70s making somewhat snooty and reductive dismissals of currently much loved and lauded writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Tolkien, Robert E. Howard et. al. Not because I agree with those criticisms, but because it helps to remind one that some well-informed people *who loved the genre* (as opposed to the ivory-tower cartoons that get easily deployed by the disgruntled) still had stringent critical problems with authors we take for granted as being inherently great. Such reminders should trigger, in an interested reader, rigorous personal introspection about what constitutes "good" and why. Unless, of course, you just read for fun - and there's nothing wrong with that, of course.
That may make this book sound dry and annoying but it's not at all - just an informative, fact-packed excursion through literature of the fantastic from a well-informed and non-American perspective. Worth your time if that sounds interesting.