The Opal (and other stories)

by Gustav Meyrink, Maurice Raraty (Editor)

"Meyrink's short stories epitomised the non-plus-ultra of all modern writing. Their magnificent colour, their spine-chilling and bizarre inventiveness, their aggression, their succinctness of style, their overwhelming originality of ideas, which is so evident in every sentence and phrase that there seem to be no lacunae: all this captivated me, and seemed to me to provide antidote to all the adjectival prose and shallow, false romanticism of the immediate preceding generation." - Max Brod

Contents:

The Ardent Soldier
The Brain
Izzi Pizzi
The Violet Death
Terror
Petroleum, Petroleum
The Curse of the Toad - Curse of the Toad
The Black Ball
The Preparation
Dr. Lederer
The Opal
The Man on the Bottle
Blamol
The Truth-Drop
Dr. Cinderella's Plants
St. Gingolph's Urn
The Ring of Saturn
The Automobile
The Waxworks
Fever
What's the Use of White Dog Shit?
Humming in the Ears
Bal Macabre
Rupert's Drops
Coagulum
The Secret of Hathaway Castle
Chimera
A Suggestion
The Invalid
G.M.
Wethergoblin

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Literature, Classics

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1903

About the author

The illegitimate child of a baron and an actress, Meyrinck spent his childhood in Germany, then moving to today's Czech Republic where he lived for 20 years. The city of Prague is present in most of his work along with various religious, occult and fantastic themes. Meyrinck practiced yoga all his life.

Curious facts:

He unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide at the age of 24. His son committed suicide at the same age with success.

Meyrinck founded his own bank but was accused of fraud for which he spent 2 months in prison.

He worked as a translator and translated in German 15 volumes by Charles Dickens while working on his own novels.

Among his most famous works are Der Golem (1914) and Walpurgisnacht (1917).

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are Gustav Meyrink. You are born illegitimate to a Viennese Baron and his actress mistress. Your life does not start out well and by the age of 24 you are going to commit suicide when a strange coincidence convinces you that occult powers exist and have real influence in the world. You immerse yourself in Magic and Hermeticism, joining the Golden Dawn and opening a bank (you will be accused of using divination to help the bank do well, and be jailed for 2 months).

And during this period of occultism and finance, you start writing stories for the newspapers (along with popular novels, including one classic, The Golem). They are strange and varied things, part Edgar Allan Poe, part E.T.A. Hoffmann, part absurdism and black humor. And nearly 100 years later, Dedalus Book collects some gems of your output into a volume called THE OPAL AND OTHER STORIES (sans table of contents, a rare lapse on the part of this usually thorough publisher).

What a strange and marvelous thing this collection is! Those looking for horror will find it, but occasionally not where they expect it to be. Many of these stories are satires of the general public, the medical profession, the army, the government and general do-gooders. So what may start as a straightforward weird tale involving dark magic, evil spirits or a sinister atmosphere (very effectively conjured, by the way) ends up simply a set-up for a punchline that pokes fun at military officers, clergywives or the financial situation of the landed gentry ("Coagulum", "The Rings of Saturn", "The Secret of Hathaway Castle"). Elsewhere, the apocalypse arrives in bizarre forms, at the hands of mad geniuses ("Petroleum, Petroleum"), through arcane Tibetan magic ("The Black Ball", "The Violet Death") or biological experiments ("Wetherglobin") that unleash destruction: oil spills, a miniature black hole, a word that turns the speaker to goop, or hordes of patriotic apes - but always the apocalypse is furthered because of the stupid, sheep-like nature of man. Doctors and Professors are ignorant in their assured arrogance and especially should never to be trusted ("The Ardent Solider", "The Brain", "The Automobile" - this last of which is a hilarious gem). These are bitter, black jokes on the audiences and readers of the time and they are marvelous.

There are also occasional flights of whimsy, as in "Blamol" in which a world of undersea creatures (talking fish, etc.) marvel over a new wonder drug that has just descended from the upper world, or "The Curse of the Toad – Curse of the Toad" in which an ancient folktale is enacted by animals (this one was performed by the dark humorist Brother Theodore on a 1950's record, BTW).

There are excursions into the decadent and conte cruel genres (the humorous "Izzi Pizzi", the nasty "The Man On The Bottle" - worthy of Roald Dahl, the fabulous revenge tale "G.M.") and these gradually shade into some real masterpieces of horror, grotesquerie and the macabre. "Bal Macabre" is a magnum opus of hallucinatory decadence, while "Dr. Cinderella's Plants", "The Preparation" and "Waxworks" are dripping with disturbing and nightmarish imagery of bodies pulled apart in freakish ways (these last two also star a strange villain of Meyrink's, somewhat like an evil, Indian, occult Dr. Caligari).

And there is still more yet to discover: the sad ghost tale of "St. Gingolph's Urn", the scatological conspiracy of "What's The Use Of White Dog Shit?", the very Poe-esque "A Suggestion", the anti-capital punishment symbolism of "Terror"....and on and on. Meyrink has many faces and all of them are fascinating.

You are Gustav Meyrink. Americans have barely heard of you. THE GOLEM is read rarely now. And yet, one hopes, you may soon receive your due as an amazing talent of the European fantastique, horror and black humor traditions. Stranger things have happened, sometimes even to you...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Opal (and Other Stories) is a stellar collection of chiefly Victorian Gothic tales, many of which feature an absurd or satirical twist at the end. The twists often direct a stab of mockery at the likes of academics, government officials, military officers, and clergy members (or their wives, in one notable case). These endings can be a bit disconcerting, as Meyrink is so superb at building suspense and dread that such a shift in mood can feel abrupt, but it still largely worked for me. Purists might be put off, though. And certainly not all of the tales end this way. Many are straight slices of existential horror, hallucinatory sequences, or occult encounters (of particular interest to Meyrink, and it shows in the strength of these particular tales). There is even a somewhat out-of-place undersea adventure story featuring an irascible cuttlefish, which includes the memorable expository line: 'In the distance a dogfish barks'.

One note of interest: in 'The Secret of Hathaway Castle', a tale within a tale, there is a reference to 'the painter Kubin' whom I can only assume is Alfred Kubin, a contemporary of Meyrink who also did illustrations originally intended for The Golem. In the scene where he appears, a group of friends is questioning their somnambulist pal who is currently in a trance. After the somnambulist mentions a Dr. Max Lederer, it is 'The Painter Kubin' who asks who this person is. As it so happens, Dr. Lederer is a character from (and the title of) an earlier story in the collection. 'Dr. Lederer' is one of the comparatively odder stories in the book, and I can't help but wonder about the possible Kubin connecton.

For everything on earth that is, as the fools would have it, 'permanent', was once no more than mere shadow - a ghost, visible or invisible, and is now still nothing more than a solidified ghost.
For that reason, everything, be it beautiful or ugly, sublime, good or evil, serene through with death in its heart or alternatively, sad though harboring secret happiness - all these things have something spectral about them.
It may be only a few who have the gift of detecting the ghostly quality of the world: it is there nevertheless, eternal and unchanging.

('The Ring of Saturn')

(Be sure to also read Shawn's review, for he does a much better job at conveying the magical nature of this book.)

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contents:

The Ardent Soldier
The Brain
Izzi Pizzi
The Violet Death
Terror
Petroleum
The Curse of the Toad - Curse of the Toad
The Black Ball
The Preparation
Dr. Lederer
The Opal
The Man on the Bottle
Blamol
The Truth Drop
Dr. Cinderella's Plants
St. Gongolph's Urn
The Ring of Saturn
The Automobile
The Waxworks
Fever
What's the Use of White Dog Shit?
Humming in the Ears
Bal Macabre
Rupert's Drops
Coagulum
The Secret of Hathaway Castle
Chimera
A Suggestion
The Invalid
G.M.
Wetherglobin

[Old-Barbarossa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable collection of short stories.
Absurd and horrific by turns. Sea creatures craving pills, odd far Eastern body modification cults, madness and obsession. By turns creepy and funny.
Maybe David Cronenberg read Mr Meyrink?

[S.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is one of those beings who has overcome his pain, and who sees with different eyes deep into another world. He feels the mysterious breath of things, the secret, silent life of the half-light.

An initiate and scholar of the occult, Meyrink puts himself out there with all the ease of second nature as someone who has seen some legitimately Weird Things in his life. Though no less an artist of the subconscious than his contemporary, Alfred Kubin, Meyrink's work leans perhaps a bit too heavily into the esoteric to ever really find a place with a general readership, which is probably why this book remains out of print. It's a shame, because there is something so singularly imaginative about his stories that reading them is akin to discovering some dark, mysterious secret (and I'll admit a couple of them went right over my head). This book of short stories has a nice balance of fantasy, absurdism, biting satire, horror, and just plain bizarre, and I think it would be appreciated by anyone with a love for unique literature.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some were really good, very twisted and original, others were just okay.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

- very readable, interesting stories, all very short
- I particularly enjoyed stories with an 'uncanny' or horror mood
- Two that stick in my mind are 'The Waxworks' and 'Dr Cinderella's Plants'