This is a collection of short stories, essays and notebook entries by Sylvia Plath. As a collection it doesn’t gel and seems disjointed but what it does do is give hints of how Plath’s writing style developed.
 
 The story this collection is named after, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, has a narrator that feels like an earlier version of The Bell Jar.

The works are a mixture of dark, coming -of-age, matter of fact and light comedy. Some are less interesting than others, and I would have been less interested in those if I had not read two biographies about Sylvia Plath. This helped me to connect to this book:

In Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams Plath is cryptically sharing her own fears of having electric shock therapy. I also recognised Rose and Percy B is about her neighbours when she lived in Devon, England, with Ted Hughes. Other works also have a relevance in some way which would not have been obvious to me without reading the biographies.
 
What’s amazing about Sylvia Plath is in her short life how much she has written and the variety.