The King in the Golden Mask and Other Stories

by Marcel Schwob, Iain White (Editor, translator)

First published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, The King in the Golden Mask gathers 21 of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories describe moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, Schwob’s stories portray clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley slaves laboring under the persecution of Louis XIV and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. These writings are of such hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they aren’t newly unearthed historical documents. To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most scintillating form as it comes into contact with this unparalleled imagination.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, France, Literature, French Literature, Weird Fiction

186 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was one of the key symbolist writers, standing in French literature alongside such names as Stephane Mallarme, Octave Mirbeau, Andre Gide, Leon Bloy, Jules Renard, Remy de Gourmont, and Alfred Jarry. His best-known works are Double Heart (1891), The King In The Gold Mask (1892), and Imaginary Lives (1896).

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The King in the Golden Mask is a variegated suite of dark metaphors for hypocrisy, envy, greed, cruelty, stupidity, fear and dread where everything is surrounded with a sheer apocalyptic aura…

In imitation of the emaciated king, the women, jesters, and priests wore unchanging faces of silver, iron, bronze, wood, and fabric. And the jesters’ masks gaped with laughter, while the priests’ were black with concern. Fifty merry faces blossomed to his left, and to his right fifty sad faces scowled. Meanwhile, the bright fabric stretched over the heads of the women mimed endlessly graceful faces enlivened by artificial smiles. But the king’s golden mask was majestic, noble, and veritably royal.

The stories are the flamboyant parade of masks… Everything is in the extreme… If there is an atrocity then it’s the ultimate atrocity…

…the Faulx-Visaiges slaughtered cruelly, eviscerating the women, skewering the children on pitchforks, searing the men over great spits to make them confess the hiding places of their money, painting the corpses with blood to levy the smallholdings and further reduce them with fear. They kept with them little girls whisked off from along the cemeteries, whose howls rang out in the night. Nobody knew if they could speak. They sprang from mystery and massacred in silence.

Masks… Disguises… Miens… False appearances… The narration is fancy, grotesque and bizarre…

The knight of Beaufort, drawing nearer, saw that they were spinning around a slab of white rock. And the three ladies of the night laughed at him when he staggered back; for they were pouring aqua regia onto the stone from a green flask – and the stone began to bubble like quick lime. And into it they cast gutted lizards, frog legs, furry rat snouts, talons of nocturnal birds, rock arsenic, black blood from a copper basin, shreds of dirty linen, mandrake roots, and the long flowers of the digitalis which are called dead man’s fingers. And all the while they said without end: “besom riders, besom riders, besom riders.”

Man is capable to show a false face without wearing any masks.

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A talented author of the French fin de siecle, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) wrote colorful, well-crafted prose crammed with historical detail and macabre imagery. He was a friend or comrade to a great many turn-of-the-century authors—Paul Valery, Alfred Jarry, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Octave Mirbeau, Pierre Louys, Marcel Proust, to name a few—and is considered to be an influence on both Borges and Bolano.

Schwob was attracted to the morbid and marvelous (Poe, Stevenson, Chesterton) from the start, but he was also an erudite man who crowded his slender fictions with a wealth of convincing historical detail. In both these respects, Schwob’s work—particularly his earlier work—resembles that of the prose-poem pioneer Aloyisius Bertrand. Each piece by these two writers is impressive and substantial, and yet somehow they strike the reader as aesthetically unbalanced. In Schwob’s case, this is exacerbated by the use of vivid, gem-like imagery, reminiscent of Theophile Gautier’s, which—when coupled with lurid subject matter and ghoulish details—has the effect of seeming deliberately provocative, self-consciously avant garde.

But perhaps I am being unfair. Schwob, in, his early twenties, spent two years nursing the love of his life, a tubercular streetwalker named Louise, through her final illness. Any sympathetic reader of Schwob’s work must sense that his concentration on death is both serious and sincere, and this is particularly true of his later works. The stories in The King in the Golden Mask (1892), the fictional biographies of real people in Imaginary Lives (1896), and the brief collection of monologues on a single historical theme in A Children’s Crusade are imaginative works so judicially constructed that they transform Schwob’s anecdotes of mortality into opportunities for meditation.

This volume offers a generous selection from the first two works listed above, the entire text of the third, and eleven earlier pieces from the collection A Double Heart (1891). Four stories fromThe King in the Golden Mask—in addition to the title piece—are of high quality (“The Embalming Women,” “The Milesian Virgins,” “The Sabbat at Mofflaines,” and “The Flute), at least four biographies in Imaginary Lives (“Crates. Cynic,” “Petronius, Novelist” “Frate Dolcino, Heretic,” “Paolo Uccello, Painter”) are superb—powerful influences Jorge Luis Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy,, and “The Children’s Crusade” is a small masterpiece, a meditation on evil that makes skillful use of the often drab color-word “white.”

I conclude with a sample of Schwob’s art. From “The Milesian Virgins,” this description of an epidemic of virgin suicides is filled with compassion yet touched by a caressing decadence too:

Suddenly, without anyone knowing the reason, vhe birgins of Miletus began hanging themselves. It was a sort of moral epidemic . . . People would be taken unawares by a harsh gasp and a tinkoing of rings, bracelets and anklets rolling on the floor, The hanged girl’s breasts heaved like the palpitating wings of a throttled bird . . . .

. . . in the middle of the night, wails rang out and, at first, believing them troubled by oppressive dreams, the night-birds of the mind, their parents rose and visited their chambers . . . But the young girl’s beds were empty. Then they heard rocking sounds the the rooms above. They were hanged, lit by the moon, white tunics trailing, hands entriwined to the roots of their fingers, and their distended lips were turning blue. At dawn the household sparrows flew on their shoulders, lightly pecking at them and, finding their flesh cold, took flight with little cries.

[Stephen Miletus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This translation, by Iain White, is not exactly of Schwob's book of this title. Instead it is a selection of stories from several of Schwob's books: Coeur double ("The double heart"), Le Roi au masque d'or ("The king in the golden mask"), Vies imaginaires ("Imaginary lives") -- which has been translated in full elsewhere -- & The children's crusade. (White explains that he did not include any stories from Book of Monelle because he believes "the book is simply not excerptible; it must be taken as a whole-- as a quite exceptionally subtle, shifting whole ... [which] defies the anthologist's scissors.")

I also need to say that I'm coming to this book after reading Imaginary Lives & The Book of Monelle, which is why I gave it a lower rating than those two books. The material from his first two books -- Coeur double ("The double heart") & Le Roi au masque d'or ("The king in the golden mask") -- are unfortunately, but understandably, not as satisfying. The Double Heart was his first collection comprised of his earliest fiction, & The King in the Golden Mask was his second. What struck me were the number of straight-up horror stories: "Train 081", "Arachne" & "The Sabbat at Mofflaines", any one of which alone would be considered run-of-the-mill short stories or sketches. (I suspect he wrote these under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe.) "The 'Papier Rouge'", another horror story, is of interest in how he successfully frames the story in the medieval documents he claims he found it in. "The Death of Odjigh" read to me too much like a pulp science fiction story, so its errors of fact & logic prevented me from enjoying it. And there are also a few examples of dark, macabre humor such as "A Skeleton" & "The Plague", something not clearly visible in his two masterpieces.

I also found myself looking for signs of his themes in his later masterpieces. The first story, "The Strigae", is a nod to Petronius, whose influence is visible in Imaginary Lives; other subjects relating to that book include the last two selections from The King in the Golden Mask which prefigure the stories concerning pirates, & a number of tales or sketches are set in the medieval France of Francois Villon's time, not only another setting that reappears in Imaginary Lives but a subject he was a recognized expert about. (Schwob published two monographs on the French of Villon's poetry.) Any stories with themes or subject matter that explicitly reappear in The Book of Monelle apparently was avoided by Iain White. However, a few stories -- "The Amber-trader" & "Blanche the Bloody" -- evoke that magical interior logic that characterize his two masterpieces.

The prize of this book were the sketches translated from Schwob's The children's crusade, his last work of fiction. This semi-legendary event (the Wikipedia article asserts it never happened) obviously caught Schwob's imagination, & he wrote several interlocking sketches that capture the mystery & the tragedy of the event. The material from that work fill only 14 pages in White's translation, too few to fill out even as short a book as Schwob typically wrote, so I assume there is more to be read & hope to read it.

[clinamen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a delightful collection. Marcel Schwob’s ethos in fiction contravenes the individual in the best possible way. He emphasizes the dividual — whispering life into the multiplicities that we are, within and without — as a means of extolling the irreducible singularity of expression. His is an erudite, intertextual style that appropriates sources and material without hesitation in the surety of their transformative redeployment. A style that never accedes to the closure of literature, but it’s infinite openness. As the translator remarks in his postscript, writing as reading as writing and reading as writing as reading. Of a piece with Borges’ fiction in his mastery of the short form and scintillating skill in evoking/inhabiting remote times, places, imaginaries, as if they were immanently present. Because they are.

[Cornelia Funke · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an unforgettable voice! Guillermo del Toro recommended Schwob to me- quite a gift. I am reading the stories in German so can't judge the English version. Hope it's equally powerful and unique!

[Vittorio Ducoli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oltre le Vite Immaginarie: i racconti semisconosciuti di un raffinatissimo simbolista

Marcel Schwob è un autore fondamentale per comprendere quella stagione della letteratura francese (e non solo) che va sotto il nome di simbolismo. In Italia è conosciuto soprattutto per Le vite immaginarie, di cui sono disponibili numerose edizioni; altri volumi, editi per lo più da piccole case editrici, consentono di farsi un’idea più completa della produzione letteraria di questo eclettico autore, che nella sua breve vita (morì a soli 38 anni nel 1905) scrisse moltissimo. Una parziale lacuna dell’offerta editoriale relativa a questo autore è rappresentata dai racconti. Schwob ne pubblicò infatti due raccolte, Cuore doppio nel 1891 e Il re dalla maschera d’oro l’anno successivo. La prima raccolta è ancora disponibile nell’edizione Kami (2005) mentre la seconda non è mai stata pubblicata per intero. E’ quindi prezioso questo vecchio volumetto di SugarCo, che raccoglie una scelta di racconti da entrambe le raccolte, perché rappresenta l’unica possibilità per il lettore italiano di farsi un’idea organica della produzione novellistica di Schwob. Purtroppo non è più in catalogo da anni, e da una breve ricerca fatta risulta difficilmente reperibile anche sul mercato online dell’usato.
Dico subito che i 17 racconti compresi in questo volume sono molto belli e, grazie anche alla traduzione di Maria Teresa Giaveri che ho apprezzato molto, ci restituiscono tutta la sapienza narrativa e stilistica di questo raffinatissimo autore.
Schwob in genere traeva spunto, per i suoi racconti, dalla sua sterminata erudizione, che gli consentiva di trarre storie dalle fonti più disparate e da letture di testi di varie epoche. Così, accanto a racconti ambientati nell’epoca in cui viveva l’autore, ve ne sono altri situati nel rinascimento e nell’antichità classica, e non mancano quelli che non possono essere ascritti ad un’epoca precisa. Ognuno dei racconti, anche in virtù della diversa ambientazione, è caratterizzato da un preciso tono narrativo, da uno stile di scrittura che si diversifica anche nettamente. Molti racconti riguardano storie tragiche ed anche macabre (Schwob era un grande ammiratore di E. A. Poe), altri hanno un tono più leggero, quasi fiabesco, e qua e là affiora anche l’ironia, C’è però un sottile filo rosso che lega tutti questi racconti, dato dall’evocatività dello scritto, dal suo essere capace di offrirci, in piena coerenza simbolista, suggestioni e rimandi che vanno ben al di là della storia narrata, toccando le corde dei sentimenti profondi e soprattutto delle angosce dell’uomo di fronte alla caducità della sua vita, di fronte alla morte, di fronte alla straniazione ed alla crudeltà indotte dalla falsità e dalla complessità dei rapporti sociali.
In questo senso credo che, se Schwob può essere considerato uno dei massimi rappresentanti letterari del simbolismo, allora non si può considerare il simbolismo stesso come una tendenza artistica volta alla ricerca dell’arte pura, dell’arte non contaminata dalla realtà sociale, come qualcuno ha scritto: il simbolismo, che nasce come reazione al naturalismo positivista intriso di fiducia nella scienza e nel progresso, rappresenta come il decadentismo, cui è strettamente apparentato, la prima presa di coscienza a livello artistico della crisi della società borghese e dei suoi valori, ed in questo senso pone le basi di molta della letteratura posteriore. Non avendo i simbolisti ancora a disposizione gli strumenti di analisi della psicologia umana di cui disporranno gli autori novecenteschi, la loro reazione alla crisi è quasi mistica quanto a forma, ma strettamente ancorata alla critica della realtà che vivevano quanto a sostanza.
Il volume si apre con il racconto forse maggiormente esemplificativo di quanto detto: la bellissima storia de Il re dalla maschera d’oro, fiaba tragica, disperata e simbolista quasi per antonomasia, è la storia delle fondamenta del potere, che si reggono sinché non viene messo in discussione il ruolo immutabile che ciascuno deve esercitare nella società, rappresentato dalle maschere che sia il re sia i suoi sudditi devono portare. Quando il re si toglie la maschera e si scopre lebbroso, quando buffoni, sacerdoti e donne a loro volta si tolgono la maschera e si vede come chi pareva ridere in realtà pianga e viceversa, il potere cristallizzato non può più reggersi, ed il re è costretto ad accecarsi ed a fuggire per affrontare la realtà, non sapendo però coglierla e venendone annientato.
Il racconto che segue, Le imbalsamatrici, di ambientazione esotica, è notevole per il suo tono notturno e macabro, ma soprattutto per come sviluppa una tematica chiave della letteratura di ogni tempo, quella del doppio.
La peste, ambientato in Italia settentrionale nel 1374, è scritto sotto forma di cronaca medievale in prima persona, e rimanda, non senza una buona dose macabra ironia di stampo quasi boccaccesco, alla classica morale del chi di spada ferisce…
Uno dei racconti più belli e misteriosi della raccolta è senza dubbio Le maschere. In poche pagine Schwob è in grado di descrivere un mondo di desolazione e di crudeltà a tinte tanto vivide e forti da ricordare certi quadri di Brueghel o Bosch. Anche in questo racconto, che significativamente riprende il tema della maschera, il richiamo alla violenza su cui si basa il potere è l’elemento centrale dell’oscura storia narrata.
Splendido è anche Le milesie, nel quale il suicidio delle giovani vergini di Mileto è causato dall’impossibilità di sopportare ciò che diventeranno da vecchie. Questo racconto può essere peraltro accostato a Lo zoccolo, che – sia pure con un tono da fiaba romantica – tratta esso pure dell’ineluttabilità dell’invecchiamento e della tragedia del vivere.
Con La macchina per parlare la polemica antipositivistica assume caratteri espliciti: la descrizione della macchina e del suo funzionamento è infatti ironicamente quasi naturalistica, e la catastrofe completa che ne segue, quando l’inventore pretende di far dire alla macchina che lui ha creato il verbo, è altrettanto ironica nella sua ineluttabilità.
Tra gli altri racconti della raccolta, come detto tutti molto belli ma che lascio alla scoperta di chi ha già il volume o di chi riuscirà a procurarselo, voglio citare solo I senza faccia e Uno scheletro.
Il primo perché emerge sicuramente quanto ad intreccio narrativo. E’ la storia di due soldati che a seguito dell’esplosione di una granata sono divenuti irriconoscibili, con le facce ridotte a ad una superficie informe con tre buchi al posto di narici e bocca. Si esprimono con suoni gutturali e l’unica attività che possono compiere è fumare la pipa. Una signora, moglie di uno dei due, nell’impossibilità di riconoscere il marito accudisce entrambi. Accanto alla tremenda denuncia della crudeltà della guerra moderna, che drammaticamente anticipa ciò che accadrà all’inizio del nuovo secolo, Schwob ci offre in questo racconto una delicatissima, ancorché paradossale, analisi dei rapporti umani che si stabiliscono tra i due senza faccia e la moglie, ed ancora una volta ci dice come le convenzioni sociali non reggono di fronte all’irruzione della realtà.
Uno scheletro, con cui la raccolta si chiude, è sicuramente il più leggero dei racconti, e ci aiuta a ritrovare il sorriso dopo l’ininterrotta processione di storie drammatiche, tragiche e macabre. Qui il gusto del macabro è utilizzato da Schwob in senso comico, ed indubbiamente il racconto ci offre una ulteriore prova delle grandi e poliedriche capacità narrative dell’autore, che qui si ispira ad uno dei suoi numerosi amici, Mark Twain.
Oltre alla perizia nelle traduzioni, la curatrice Maria Teresa Giaveri ci offre un bellissimo saggio finale, che ci aiuta ad avvicinarci alla vita, all’epoca e alla poetica di questo grande e non troppo conosciuto autore.
Con questi racconti Schwob si rivela a mio avviso, come detto, uno dei grandi anticipatori del novecento letterario. E’ stato infatti strano, dopo avere letto alcune novelle di Arthur Schnitzler, autore nel quale il tema della maschera gioca un ruolo centrale, avere a che fare con le numerose maschere che Schwob, alcuni decenni prima, mette in campo nei suoi racconti. La letteratura è affascinate anche per questo: per i numerosi rimandi e confronti che si possono fare tra autori ed epoche diverse, per come i grandi autori, pur ciascuno immerso appieno nell’epoca in cui vive, si affidino ad alcuni archetipi, a simboli riconoscibili dal lettore anche di secoli dopo per affidarci i loro messaggi nella bottiglia.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite my .AVG, .SLG, .OPS, .OBP, .WAR, EqA, wOBA or any of the other casual formulae testifying to my dominance of the physical art of baseball, even I do not hit a home run every single time I step into the box (and cry out which seat number in the outfield will be receiving my moonshot). This does not stop me from total rule and command of the diamond.

Sometimes, even I have to automatic double that ball straight and gentle-like to the sweet, cotton-skirted lap of the lil old gal sitting in the seat I called out and pointed to, or else I wouldn’t be a man of honor. And I am.

This book is Schwob’s automatic double.

[Rick Powell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprising good collection of stories considering they were first published in 1892. Kit Schluter did a great job translating this book, and you can see why Schwob was top notch when it came to French symbolism. Some stories eerie. Some haunting. Others sublime in their storytelling. The title story is open to conjecture if it was the inspiration for Chambers’ The King in Yellow, but a fine collection outright.

[Maggie Siebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty good

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Below is one of its observations at the time of the review.


THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE (1896)

“There are wicked people who put out children’s eyes. And who saw off their legs and tie their arms, so as to expose them and implore pity.”
“I often dream of blood: I could bite with my teeth: they are uncorrupted. […] That is why I lay in wait for those children…”

About 15 pages of eight short narrations or monologues triangulating the possibly historical gestalt of – or ‘oratorio’ about – what appears to be a crusade by children, across the sea from Europe towards Jerusalem and the Islamic State of yore. Involving entrails, viscera and religious angsts germane to the Cannibals of West Papua, together with the so-called migrants who TODAY are travelling in the opposite direction and drowning in their thousands. It also seems a bit ironic that the Church had this baleful effect on children for centuries, not just recently.

“The constituent parts of the world are as guilty, one as the other, when they do not follow the lines of goodness; for they proceed from Him.”
“Consecrated sea, what have you done with our children?”

Leprosy as a white. White as purity.

“…and drew out the heart, from which he expressed the black blood. […] …and drew out the viscera, which he purified.”
“…and I opened my teeth under my hood, and I leant over towards his cool young throat…”
“And the Lord will let all my little children come to his tomb. And the white voices will be joyful in the night.”
“Lord, all these innocents will be delivered over to shipwreck, or to the adorers of Mahomet. I see that the Sultan of Baghdad lies in wait for them…”

So, yes, a premonitory work by Schwob, combining absurdity and truth, a combination representative of what life always is – and this crusade is coda to this book’s heat-seeking soul in the meaty and bony bits that are us.

“…we saw many poor birds stretched on the frozen earth.” — Full circle from this book’s outset with ‘strigae’?
“What shall we do here on earth? There will be an expiatory monument, a monument to unknowing faith.”

A dead monument to once ancient hope.

[William Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Woof. This was a hard one to slog through. All plot and no story, no narrative, no flair, no style. It felt flat and biblical, the outlines of a new mythology, biblical moral tales to live by. You know the writing advice of "show, don't tell"? Well Schwob had not been clued into that one because that's all he wants to do here is tell you about all the things, and show you none of them. Insanely disappointing.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I honestly only read this for the title story, which I thought was the best one of the collection. There were a few others that were compelling, disturbing, and creepy. Overall, a good collection of short stories.

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 21 stories in this collection are primarily dark, grim tales, with mostly unpleasant endings. They range from slight fantasy, to grim modern, to slightly sci-fi.
The stories are a cruel, almost sadistic, telling of characters trapped in an unforgiving world. The narration is cold, matter-of-fact, or lusty in thick details (as we see above). What will happen to his characters is up in the air, with a fifty-fifty shot that the protagonists will survive. Each paragraph is charged with poetic energy, placing him on par with Ambrose Bierce or H. P. Lovecraft. I consider it almost a crime, he hasn’t been translated into English before.
The style of the stories are a little odd. Most of the material in it build-up to an event which then happens quickly, leading to a hasty end. Let’s say for a ten page story, eight is mostly exposition. In fact, several of them almost seem to be completely background material for a larger story, which the author never wrote, or should have written. Still, it is so beautifully composed that I don’t care that much and simply enjoy the ride.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

CW: Sexual Assault & Suicide

What a weirdo collection of dark vignettes. It’s hard to believe they were written in the 1890s. The dark otherworldly short shorts trade depth to paint visually sumptuous moments captured in motion. Characters and plot are sidelined for wild descriptions of scenarios or a single scenario with a cruel twist.

It's strange and unsettling, but delightfully poetic. Sometimes the little fictions are apocalyptic with larger than life scenarios, sometimes unreal fantastical courts or small French villages. Most frequently it delivers the mundane in a medieval or pastoral setting; depicting the indifference of societies expectations, returning knights ravaging the countryside or crimes gone wrong. One note punches, punctuated by occasional flourishes of gore.

It feels like the foundation to dark fantasy. If you want short little jabs of esoteric brutishness, check this out.

[Seizure Romero · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful Zagava edition has cover and interior illustrations by Michael Hutter, which serve to enhance the odd, the obscure, the fantastic, and the decadent nature of the stories within.

This volume contains:
The King in the Golden Mask
The Death of Odjigh
The Embalming-Women
The Plague
The Milesian Virgins
The Sabbat at Mofflaines
Blanche the Bloody
The Flute
The Sleeping City

The text is credited to Iain White's Carcanet Press edition, which contains 21 stories.

[N. M. D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As masks are the sign that there are faces, words are the sign that there are things."



This small volume of late 19th century strange stories is worth the read if you like weird fiction. These tiny stories, told in a very straight forward way, as though delivering a simple account of actual events, are overflowing with dreamlike surrealism, shadowy landscapes, and dark symbolism. I often found the meaning impenetrable but even then, the strange imagery is enjoyable just in its oddness. There's a focus on things-aren't-always-what-they-seem themes. There are murderous embalmers, leperous kings, pirates, murderers, runaway prisoners, and all sorts of odd characters. It's a book I think I'll be picking up and jumping to a random story here and there, and I will probably pick up more of Schwob's work.

[Juanjo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a delightful, a sort of middle ground between what's usually grouped as 'weird fiction' (even outright references Robert Chambers) sharing the same influences: Poe, Baudelaire; and the direction later writers influenced by him, like Borges, take.

Manages to be unique also because it often steers away from the usual dread always present in the genre, though not completely. By shifting more into surrealism and symbolism, he's able to start different stories in a similar moods but have them end in opposite directions that both come across extremely natural. And I really like after going through a fair deal of books looking to shock you, not always knowing whether the stories will try to surprise you with stress or joy.

[ingrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the strangest collection of (very) short stories I have ever read or will ever probably encounter. They are apparently based on the author's extremely wide education and knowledge of all sorts of events and myths beginning a long ago. He was a highly and widely educated man, writing in the late 1800's. They can be disturbing, sad, bizarre, thought-provoking, parable-like, speculative, etc. I must admit that one of the collections was very hard to understand. There are obscure foreign words scattered within a number of the stories as well as references to historical myths and such that I was not familiar with. The title story probably is the best, as others have opined.

[George · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me preface this with how much I loved The Book of Monelle: That book is one of my favorites and I even bought multiple copies of it and re-read it several times.

This book though? Only the first few stories feel like actual stories. The rest are just a series of random events. The characters and plot have no depth beyond imagery and even then it’s a little thin.

If you’re looking to start with this author read The Book of Monelle first.

[flannery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great adjectives in this book, like "grogblossomed." Everyone dies. Also made me realize my #1 fantasy might be being mummified??

[Neto Meza · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really good collection of short stories.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories that still read as fresh as they must have been back in the day. They’re fuckin brilliant. Do ya self a favour
READ THIS

[Erez · Rating 5 out of 5]

this mf don't miss

[Enrico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Da leggere con attenzione.
Maestro dell’assurdo, ironico e macabro .