Filmed in 1976 by Roman Polanski, and a product of the Panic Movement (named after Pan, not the emotional state) that the author founded with Alejandro Jodorowsky, French artist Roland Topor’s The Tenant is a cruel, funny horror novel that arrives bleeding surrealism from all the glass embedded in its face. This kind of absurdist Euro-horror is a special genre blend that is often avoided by horror fans, but this book is so sharp it’s guaranteed to please all palates. It’s just too fast-moving, too funny, and too sick to be relegated to the top shelf of Lord Sniffypants’s private library.

This is a great edition of the book.

Trelkovsky sucks. He’s a meek, simpering clerk looking for an apartment in Paris where real estate is rare. He manages to land a place for well below market because the previous tenant, Simone Choule, killed herself by jumping out the window and crashing through the glass greenhouse in the courtyard. Only she’s not dead yet. Trelkovsky visits her in the hospital, finding a mummy wrapped in bandages that emits one, soul-shattering, endless howl of pain from the horror hole that was her mouth. That’s cool, though, because he gets the apartment and moves in. Almost immediately, he finds himself engaged in a battle of wits with his neighbors.

Roland Topor looks like the kind of guy

who hung out with Jodorowsky.

They complain about his noise constantly, even when he’s not making any. They try to force him to sign petitions, they stand motionless in the toilet across the courtyard and stare at him, they make bizarre noises outside his door. And, slowly, successfully, they try to drive Trelkovsky insane. Although the guy wasn’t in great shape to start with. Here he is responding to a knock at the door:

“So he was going to have to justify himself again, to explain everything he did, to ask forgiveness for the mere fact that he was alive! He was going to have to say something like: look at me, I’m not worthy of your anger, I’m nothing but a dumb animal who can’t prevent the noisy symptoms of his decay, so don’t waste your time with me, don’t dirty your hands by hitting me, just try to put up with the fact that I exist, I’m not asking you to like me, I know that that’s impossible, because I’m not likable, but at least do me the kindness of despising me enough to ignore me.”

All they did was knock.

Trelkovsky isn’t a total waste of space, however, and he tries to fight back against his neighbors as best a dehumanized, spineless automaton who has been ground beneath the iron heel of late 20th century capitalism can. It’s this fighting that keeps Trelkovsky interesting, and makes his story more readable than a lot of stories about people being gaslit and going quietly berserk. The humor is found both in his hopeless situation and in the methods the neighbors use in their campaign to eradicate his personality, ranging from tying a glove to a long stick and poking it in his window, to performing an absurdist happening in the courtyard.

Some of Topor’s art. The man doesn’t like birds.

But at heart, The Tenant is a horror novel, and the horror is like a lobster dropped down your pants: strange and clammy. Trelkovsky wakes up to find himself made-up to look like a woman, he finds teeth hidden in a hole in the wall of his apartment, he finds himself followed, framed, stalked, and manipulated. All the guy wanted was a cheap apartment to call home, and instead what he got was a bunch of neighbors from hell, a soul shattered by existential angst, and a nightmare curse born in a spasm of blood and terror. It’s how close this is to most apartment-dweller’s actual experiences that make it so horrific.

Yeah, Topor is that kind of artist.

Amazing film fest poster drawn by Topor.