Munro originally wanted to call the book "Tobermory and Other Sketches", then changed his mind in favour of "Beasts and Super-Beasts", which was eventually used as the title of his next collection.

[8] Clovis, the "Playboy of the Week-End World",[9] is a snobbish, amoral, epicene, complacent young dandy,[10][11] "an exquisite projection of adolescent ambition and...boyhood brutality" in George James Spears' words.

"[16] The Spectator also compared the book to W. W. Jacobs, and judged that "Mr. Munro has an extraordinarily freakish fancy, a witty pen and great skill in depicting certain types of fashionable pleasure-hunters of the day.

[18] S. P. B. Mais, in 1920, said that it was generally seen as Munro's best and most characteristic work, writing that it displayed his understanding of and love for animals, his almost inhuman aloofness from suffering, his first-hand knowledge of house-parties and hunting, his astounding success in choice of names for his characters, his gift for epigram, his love of practical jokes, his power of creating an atmosphere of pure horror, his Dickensian appreciation of food and the importance of its place in life, his eerie belief in rustic superstitions, and his neverfailing supply of bizarre and startling plots.[19]A.

A. Milne, in an introduction to a 1926 edition of Clovis, singled out "The Background" and "Mrs Packletide's Tiger" as the most successful stories, showing "in addition to his own shining qualities, a compactness and a finish which he did not always achieve.

"[7] George James Spears, in his 1963 study The Satire of Saki, wrote that the Clovis stories were Munro's most characteristic, most frequently anthologized, and by far his best.

"[20] Munro's biographer A. J. Langguth observed in 1981 that in The Chronicles of Clovis "He had reached that degree of proficiency where the humor came less from his jokes than from the precision of each sentence.