Prince of Darkness is a collection of Russell's magazine stories from about 1955 to 1970. Several appeared in Playboy, of which he was for a long time fiction editor. 'The Prince of Darkness' is actually 'The Cage', the title under which it was originally published in 1958 and as which it reappears in 1980's Haunted Castles.
The best story here is 'Domino' (1967), which is almost long enough to be a novella. It is certainly long enough to allow Russell's 'contemporary' style (very different to his 'gothic' style) to work effectively. It's the story of Jack Straw, a jaded journalist who is lavishly commissioned to cover the funeral of a South American dictator who has died of meningitis. Straw is the ideal man for the job because he wrote a book about President Mendoza's previous career as a controversial film director who married his muse, a former nude dancer. Because of the book, Straw has contacts at the highest level of government in the unnamed Latin nation. It's a story in which nothing and no one is as they seem. An expert long short story well worth the lesser work that precedes it here.
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