is a story that I'd recommend to anyone. 
is a story a Lafferty fan would like. 
are short stories, that are either really boring or just lesser variations of a recurrent theme.
This is the first (?) part of the loosely knit "The Devil is Dead" trilogy. The book starts off great, and I was sure that this was to be one of the excellent ones. A motley group of people "The Dirty Five" live it up in Australia, until the war breaks out, where they then find themselves in the Pacific. Unfortunately shortly afterwards the story runs out of gas and Lafferty fills up the pages with a lot of poems (that I personally, don't like very much), some medievalistic catholic musings and a halfhearted polemic against modern art and artists in particular.
There is so much good stuff here, that it makes the book a very worthwhile read. Alas Lafferty's inability to sew all the good bits together into a coherent piece, make this book much less than excellent.