Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker

by Jean Lorrain, Brian M. Stableford (Translator)

None of Jean Lorrain’s biographers has contrived to discover exactly when or why he began taking ether, or how much of it he took before realising (too late) that it was an extremely bad idea. The drug certainly helped provide the feverish, nightmarish atmosphere of these wonderfully decadent and sophisticated tales, and many of the apparitions with which they are populated. Brian Stableford’s superb translations represent the first appearance in English of Jean Lorrain’s ether-inspired ‘nightmares’, originally collected as Sensations et Souvenirs in 1895. The later tales also translated here for the first time are in the tradition of the contes cruel, and in them the influence of ether-drinking is still very much apparent. In his authoritative Introduction Brian Stableford presents Lorrain as one of the select band of literary figures “whose life and art were bound together into the most seamless whole. He was the man who embodied, more intimately and more inescapably than any other, the absurdities, affectations, paradoxes and perversities of the Decadent style and the Decadent world-view.”

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, France, 19th Century, Weird Fiction, French Literature

267 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1895

About the author

Jean Lorrain, born Paul Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school.

Lorrain was a dedicated disciple of dandyism, and openly gay. Lorrain wrote a number of collections of verse, including La forêt bleue (1883) and L'ombre ardente, (1897). He is also remembered for his decadent novels and short stories, such as Monsieur de Phocas (1901) and Histoires des masques (1900), as well as for one of his best novels, Sonyeuse, which he links to portraits exhibited by Antonio de La Gandara in 1893.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker is a collection of twenty-seven very readable, highly provocative and enjoyable short-stories by Jean Lorrain, member of the French Decadent movement of the late nineteenth century. And Jean Lorrain was a decadent with attitude: as a leading journalist of the day, many of his literary reviews were brutal. How brutal? Marcel Proust challenged him to a duel. Guy de Maupassant likewise requested pistols at ten paces. You can read all about Lorrain’s fascinating life and the stages of his literary output in translator Brian Stableford’s excellent thirty-page introduction.

And this introduction also includes how Lorrain’s ether drinking was part of the French literary scene’s experimentation with substances like opium and hashish, conducted by, most notably, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. Sidebar: Brian Stableford notes how addiction to ether killed Jean Lorrain, since Lorrain found out too late that drinking ether is like imbibing rat poison. So, please don’t try this at home, gang.

Ether doesn’t play a part in all these stories but nightmares of one stripe or another most certainly do. For me, I couldn’t put the book down. I started reading in the evening and couldn’t stop; rather than sleeping, I spent the entire night riveted to every page, mesmerized by Lorrain’s breathtaking storytelling. Over the course of the next week I reread, slowly and carefully. This being said, I’d love to share my take on all these stories but since I am writing a book review and not a book, I’ll exercise restrain and comment on three of my very favorites:

The Possessed
The narrator’s friend Serge insists he’s perfectly healthy since he hasn’t taken ether in a year: he eats like a horse, sleeps like a log and can run up hills like a teenager. However, he must leave Paris before the cold weather sets in and the city becomes fantastically haunted and he starts hallucinating. Serge goes on, “You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.”

Well my goodness, a man terrified by reality. How did this happen? Serge explains how his mind-creations, those invisible ghosts and ghouls that haunted him during his ether-drinking days have disappeared but have been replaced by much more sinister phantoms: everyday people! We are given lurid detail of what happens nowadays when Serge encounters people in the street and when boarding the tram. For example: “ I was possessed . . . by the conviction that all the people facing and sitting to ether side of me were beings of some alien race, half-beast and half-man: the disgusting products of I don’t know what monstrous copulations, anthropoid creatures far closer to the animal than to the human, with every foul instinct and all the viciousness of wolves, snakes, and rats incarnate in their filthy flesh.”

Such visions of reality reveal the inglorious underbelly of hallucination-inducing drugs. And such horrific visions also speak to the decadent world-view. Recall how des Esseintes, the effete, hyper-sensitive aristocrat and main character in J-K Huysmans’s novel Against Nature (À rebours), cult favorite of the decadents, becomes nauseated when spotting a few potbellied, mutton-chopped bourgeois at a train station. This negative experience of everyday people is intensified one hundred-fold in Lorrain’s tale. And If this short-story is in any way autobiographical, it’s no wonder the author’s decadent lifestyle mirrored his decadent writing.

The Locked Room
Contrary to his usual decision to remain in Paris and partake of the opera and theater, the narrator accepts his friend’s offer to participate in a hunt out in the country. Since there are no rooms available in the chateau, he is given room in the guest house. Bad luck! Turns out, the host’s long deceased mother was adjudged mad and locked away in that very room.

The first night the narrator has an experience he will never forget. He is suddenly awakened from his sleep; he sits bolt upright in a sweat as he hears the playing of a harpsichord in the adjoining room. Then, even more mysterious and creepy, enveloped in the darkness of the night, he feels the pressure of breath on his face, then a thin, faint imploring voice: “Take me away. Take me away” followed by the noise of fleeing footsteps, a door closing and a key turning a lock. Horrified, he attempts to flee but escape is impossible, for the doors are locked. He pulls a chair over and sits up reading and keeping vigilant watch all night. The next morning he wakes up in bed. Were all the events of the previous night a nightmare? Or, did he really receive a visit from the mother’s ghost? The narrator receives a sign that keeps him wondering.

With this short-story we hear echoes from another J-K Huysmans novel, Becalmed (En Rade), where a similar Parisian ventures to a similar French chateau with a similar guest house. The fin de siècle decadents were miles away from romantic notions of nature and country; rather, for them, rustic, rural life was primitive, uncouth, ominous and noxious. Here is the way our Parisian narrator in The Locked Room puts it: “The guest-house of the Marquis de Hauthere stood beside that stagnant pool, in the midst of wild grasses, rotting in the rain. Its atmosphere was strange, unsettling and mysterious. The thick silence was undisturbed save for the weathervanes on the roof creaking in the October wind; all around was the conspiratorial silence of the voiceless and echoless woods, dormant beneath a blanket of fog.”

A Posthumous Protest
A visiting friend is aghast when he sees the decapitated head of Donatello’s Unknown Woman sitting on the narrator’s shelf. The narrator, in turn, confesses he performed the decapitation on a whim. The friend accuses him of a monstrous act against art and humanity, a Satanic impulse that will certainly have dire consequences.

Sitting in his armchair several evenings later, the narrator relates his shocking encounter: “I saw – oh horror! – that the cut-off head shone strangely in the gloom. The fixed eyes were illuminated by a halo of light which bathed her, surrounding her golden hair with a radiant aureole. From those staring eyes – her terrible eyes, whose dead pupils I had myself outlined in ultramarine – darted two rays of light, directed at the sealed door, now laid bare by the curtain which I had removed.” He then goes on to describe how a naked decapitated young woman appears at the doorway with blood trickling between her shoulders.

To see just how far the French decadent literary movement separated itself from 19th century romanticism, let’s compare this Lorrain tale with The Mummy’s Foot by Théophile Gautier. In Gautier’s romantic tale, the narrator purchases a mummy’s foot from a Parisian antique dealer and that night has a dream of enchantment where he travels back to ancient Egypt with a beautiful princess to have a series of thrilling, exotic, heart-throbbing adventures. Nothing of this sort for Lorrain’s narrator; rather, his meeting with a young, beautiful woman is horrific (after all, he decapitated her) -- he is pulled down into a ghastly, hair-raising nightmare. Ah, the decadents!

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I noted before, it just does not get any better than this.

I had no clue when I first picked up Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas that it would mark the beginning of my obsession with this author, and indeed, this entire school of writing. I also noted that Lorrain's work has a way of causing the outside world to disappear because I am so deep into his, a rarity for me. This collection of 27 short stories only cements that feeling.

Once again, I won't be going into any detail about any of these dark tales because, like the stories in his The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies, they really are best discovered on one's own. The contents of this collection are divided into Early Stories (7), Sensations (9), Souvenirs (3), Récits (4) and Contes (4), and they are some of the best, darkest, eeriest works I've ever read.

Brian Stableford's excellent introduction to this volume offers the reader a look at not just the contents of these stories, but also a brief glimpse into Lorrain's somewhat troubled life. His stories here (and elsewhere) encompass what was at the time "sexual perversity," which as Stableford notes in another excellent work Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence, cost him any chance of being translated into English and being noted as a "writer of the first rank in his own country." Luckily, Stableford himself has translated Lorrain's work for modern readers, and as a bonus, he is also an expert in the field of Decadent fiction.

Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker shows a very wide-ranging Jean Lorrain. As always, most of his stories reveal, as one of his characters notes in "The Possessed," "the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life that turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror." (124). His Contes are just plain unsettling, taking place among the beauty and strangeness of nature, and his supernatural stories are dark, ambiguous, and caused no end of unease.

I cannot explain why these stories fascinate me the way they do, but while I'm in his brain I don't want to leave. I know that sounds kind of strange, but it is what it is. It is a dark and dangerous place but for some reason, his work exerts some kind of bizarre pull that I can't resist.

For a longer post, I have more at my reading journal if anyone's at all interested.

Okay, Brian Stableford: time for another translation!

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

It would be difficult for a collection to completely fulfill the enticing promise offered by such a provocative title. I was doubtful that it could and such doubt was not unwarranted. To be fair, this is a broad selection of Lorrain's writings spanning the length of the fin de siècle period, and the so-called ether nightmares only constitute a fraction of its content. In the section of early stories, Lorrain is clearly just getting his footing; these are brief sketches of minor significance in his oeuvre. Lorrain would hit his stride with the publication of Sensations and Souvenirs, selections from which comprise the next two sections of the collection. The ether nightmares are found in 'Sensations', and most of these revolve around a reclusive dandy hallucinating an otherworldly presence while ensconced in his baroque apartment, which is invariably lined with thick Persian rugs and draped in ornate tapestries. It's not easy to choose favorites among these as they tend to blur into a single phantasmagorical montage, but I found 'A Posthumous Protest' to be a particular standout.

The final two sections include a selection of récits (where a self-awareness of the narrative exists, creating a separation from it) and lastly a few contes (specifically here conte cruels, which end in an ironic twist of fate). The récits were okay—as with other tales in the collection these often include thinly veiled references to Parisian decadent society at the time, which Brian Stableford duly explains in his notes and excellent introduction. The conte cruels, with the exception of 'Narkiss', were a bit too repetitive and formulaic for my taste, though I can imagine that at the time of original publication they probably raised a few eyebrows.

Ether consumption aside, the decadent dandies indulged in a culture of illness, which they considered a badge of honor, it being largely symbolic of their impressions of the world at that moment in history. The more mysterious and debilitating the illness, the higher one's social status. This culture certainly pervades Lorrain's work, which I find heavy and exhausting to read if I consume too much of it at one sitting. Personally I would have preferred more ether nightmares in this collection (are there more yet to be translated?), but I do think it serves as a satisfactory survey of Lorrain's short fiction. However, my impressions remain too diffuse to assign a rating.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book so representative of the 19th-century French Decadence that the words within all but cast yellow shadows, and one almost feels that one should be sipping from a glass of absinthe while perusing its poisonous pages. I've always felt that Jean Lorrain (along with Leon Bloy) was one of the more criminally untranslated writers of that era, so it's nice to see another English version of his work in print (as far as I know, the only other book of his that has been translated into English is his 1901 novel "Monsieur de Phocas"). Granted, in terms of style he can't compete with J.K. Huysmans (though few writers can), though I'd certainly rate him (from the little I've read of his work) over similar writers of his day, such as Rachilde or Remy de Gourmont.

The 27 stories in this slim volume (most of them taken from Lorrain's 1895 collection "Sensations et Souvenirs") mostly take place in fin de siècle France and revolve around a motley assembly of opera singers, journalists, poets, dandies, writers, sculptors, and (it must be said) highly pretentious artists; you know that you're reading a short story written in the fin de siècle when you come across dialogue such as this (from his story "The Visionary"): "Do you think that you can live for any length of time with all these severed heads without suffering a nervous breakdown?" Many of the stories could be classified as horror (or, at the very least, supernatural), though often the horrors involved can be traced to the character's use (or, more accurately, abuse) of ether (hence the book's title). Thematically, Lorrain's stories are overflowing with much of the imagery that modern readers tend to associate with the Decadence, tinged with a hint of the Gothic: lesbian vampires, homosexual dandies, masked balls, haunted houses, monstrous animals (in this case, mostly birds and toads), etheromaniacs, sexual sadists, the Witches' Sabbat, séances gone bad, Assyrian demons, sinister fairies, and so on. After awhile, the stories give the impression that the reader has somehow wandered into a Odilon Redon or Félicien Rops etching that has been translated into words. Like Huysmans, Lorrain is eager to prove that he's well-read, and he namedrops a number of other writers in his stories, including E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Poe, Eliphas Levi, Peladan, the Marquis De Sade, Zola, and, of course, Huysmans himself.

My favorite stories here would be "The Egregore," "A Troubled Night," "A Posthumous Protest," "The Holes in the Mask" (which almost strikes me as being a proto-Ligottian story), "The Possessed" (an extremely misanthropic story in which the main character hallucinates that the people he sees out on the street are half-human, half-animal hybrids), "The Double," "The Toad," and so on. I also enjoyed the last two stories, "Narkiss" and "The Princess aux Miroirs," which are fairy tales set in Ancient Egypt and which are written in prose so purple that it would make even Clark Ashton Smith blush (a sample of a passage from "Narkiss" might illustrate this point: "As they spring forth thus, in a malign tumult of leaves and stems, these lilies of snow, these nacreous irises cannot help but remind me of Narkiss and the monstrous water-lilies of legend... and of all the other sinister and luminous calyces, nourished on the blood of sacrifices, which floated like vegetal vampires on the stagnant water of the Nile, at the foot of a great staircase leading down from a temple - where the young Pharaoh, his unclothed body radiant with gems, flowers and ornamental ivories, came to tread his leisurely paces in the twilight"). Not that I'm complaining, mind: I quite enjoy over-the-top purple prose.

[Patrick.G.P · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Nightmares of an Ether Drinker, the protagonists are the damned and restless, from writers, sculptors and dandies in fin de siècle France to doomed princesses trapped within dark and twisted fairy-tales, all of them looking for love, beauty, and the unknown. In his introduction, Brian Stableford writes that Lorrain’s favorite word was equivocal, which perfectly sums up the stories in this collection. Lorrain never lets us peer too long behind the veil and what seems like a ghastly apparition might just have been the ether working its nightmarish wonders upon the mind of the narrator.

Reading these tales, it feels as if one is trapped inside some strange dream, where nothing is as it should be. Time stands still and seems to lose meaning. Beautiful and delicate prose depict strange protagonists, haunted by some outside presence, maybe the mere lust for the unknown or the deadly drops of ether whose scent lies heavily over these pages. Some of the stories reminded me of the films of Jess Franco, heady, ethereal, lingering in a world all of their own, decadent, disturbing but also strangely beautiful.

Jean Lorrain’s prose is ever delicate, alluring and evocative of strange, half-remembered dreams, weird spectres and ether fuelled hallucinations. This collection should be a revered treasure in your library, to be taken out when you need a reminder that the veil that separates dream and reality is thinner than you might think.

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prototype Decadent/drug culture book from the turn-of-the-century France. Short narratives that deal with the supernatural, fairytales, the occult, sexual observations, and of course, ether-drinking. Reading this, I gather Jean Lorrain's work is very pulp orientated of that time and place (Paris). For me, not as enjoyable as reading the Fantomas series of around the same time, but still, an important piece of literary history, that now has come to light, thanks to the translator and editor Brian Stableford. His long introduction is absorbing, especially comparing and talking about Lorrain's relationship with Proust, and writers from the Decadent era. Lorrain is one writer who takes the decadent label very seriously.

[Warren Fournier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author Jean Lorraine was responsible for one of the most nightmarish scenes of horror I have encountered--his own death. It wasn't quick. It wasn't pretty. The details I will spare you here, and you'll just have to research it yourself if you are that interested. But the cause of his death? Well, the title of this book says it all.

I think my own soul came second-hand from some dandy who once lived in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. I wish I could travel back in time and hang out in old London and Paris of that era. But I am quite sure I would not want to live there for any extended period. This must have been one of the unhealthiest and most poisonous environments ever. Of course, I'm not sure that our current situation is much better. But with rising industrialism and the dismantling of "ancien regime" zoning mechanisms, France was just as poisonous as Victorian England during the years when Lorraine lived and worked. Let's examine what Europeans were exposed to every day. Mercury in their hats. Alum in their bread. Arsenic in their clothes and in their favorite shade of green. Lead in their paint and even in their cheese. Antinomy in their eye shadow and belladonna in their actual eyes. Carbon monoxide, methane, and sulfides in their air. So people didn't feel very good most of the time, and as a result, they were sucking down patent medicines full of every deadly chemical you could imagine. On top of that, the recreational drugs of choice were things like absinthe, laudanum, hashish, and cocaine which were easy to procure and affordable. No wonder they had chronic headaches, weird Iillnesses, digestion problems, and died of the vapors when they got rained on or stressed out. It was also probably why ghosts, like oysters, were in season around the holidays. Lorraine added to these insults when he decided to experiment with the effects of ether on the human psyche in an attempt to mimic the psychedelic experiments of fantasy authors of the Symbolist/Decadent period.

Before Lorraine began adding a dash of ether to his wine, he had already made a name for himself writing scathing literary critiques and books about perversions most had never imagined. He liked being a provacateur, especially when it paid the bills, since he wasn't a trust fund baby like he had hoped to be after his father died. He was a frail and sickly fellow, which may have been in fashion for the misunderstood literary avant garde, but Lorraine actually needed to work for a living and didn't have time to be down for the count. Ether was reputed to have stimulating effects, so he took to it like an exhausted young single parent undergrad with ADHD who needed to be back in class after sucking on a binki all night at a rave.

If you are interested further in a psychological and sociocultural exploration of Lorraine and his reasons for drug use, I would recommend you check out Brian Stableford's foreword to his English translation of this collection. Stableford is arguably one of the greatest living geniuses in science fiction and horror, and certainly the most important scholar for the preservation of almost forgotten French fantasy literature. Check out his extensive catalogue of adapted French gems from Black Coat Press and thank me later.

But what about the actual content of this book? The original title is "Contes d’un buveur d’éther," which translated literally means "tales of an ether-drinker." Therefore, this is a collection, and consists of ghost stories, nightmares, hallucinations, and just plain dreariness. Several stories contain recurring characters and themes. They were inspired by his days of ether experiments while living in a spooky and oppressive apartment in the Rue de Courty, which he called his "haunted house." The author himself did not believe in ghosts, but you can imagine just what kind of tales may have been inspired from such an environment. Here is an excerpt from "An Undesirable Residence" that captures the general feel of this discomfiting collection:

"...no one was out and about in that part of Saint-Germain on that particular night. It was so dismally deserted that as I arrived at the sinister little square, with the wind rustling the leafless branches in the park and the high black houses all around, I couldn’t resist a certain feeling of malaise."

Mouldy odors, oozing walls, morphing faces, dark hallways, masked figures, despairing drunks, blood-red lips, creaking floors, haunted harpsichords, beating rain, lamplit streets. The daring reader will absolutely bathe in the atmosphere of classic horror chills.

Perhaps the most traditional ghost story in the collection is "The Locked Room," about a man invited to a hunting party who arrives to find that all the rooms of the chateau are full with other guests. So he spends the night in an ancient cottage on the grounds of the estate. His room smells strangely of ether. In the middle of the night, he hears strange noises in the next room that scare the piss out of him, but when he tries to leave, he finds he is locked in. This is an incredibly eerie masterpiece that is perfect for reading alone in the dark.

Another creepy story of note is "A Posthumous Protest." At first, I thought Lorraine had ripped this idea directly off from a horror short by Theophile Gautier called "The Mummy's Foot," but I was wrong. There was a second story called "The Mummy's Foot" which had been published in 1912 by Jessie Adelaide Middleton, and this is the one I remembered for the chilling scene of a man finding a female figure hiding behind a heavy tapestry, revealed only by her foot showing beneath the drape. So I thought maybe that Lorraine was tributing Gautier, since he was definitely mimicking Gautier's drug use for literary inspiration, but it looks like in this case Lorraine's story is the original, and one that will be sure to give you goosebumps.

Two of his stories have Dostoevskian titles: "The Possessed" and "The Double." The first is the account of a man's post-acute psychosis after two years of ether use, and the message seems to be "Don't do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad, m'kay?" Now, I have no idea what kind of high ether was supposed to impart, but this story, like all of this book, doesn't make it sound pleasant at all. It doesn't seem like you'd want to noodle-dance to Phish or the Grateful Dead. Instead, ether intoxication seems like the worst of being heavily stoned or on a bad acid trip. All the imperfections in a person are enhanced when you look at them, like the tint of their skin or the mottling of their network of veins, which then leads to paranoid conclusions. You focus on the paleness of the people sitting next to you on the bus and they look like mannequins... or vampires. You start to fancy that maybe everyone has been replaced by simulacra, and then you notice one of them giving you the side eye, and you suddenly realize that they are all on to you. And even if you don't get that delusional, you can't help but at least obsess over how sickly everyone looks and how this is an indictment of the superficial ratrace of modern urban living. Sounds like a good time!

As a Looney Tunes fan, my only concept of the effects of ether were from a scene where Bugs Bunny is "tripping" with an evil scientist: "Come... back... heeerrre... you... rab... bit!" After reading this book, I'll now forever associate the drug with nightmare fuel.

As a side note, the Brian Stableford adaptation is missing one story due to copyright issues, since it appeared in the 1994 Andrew Mangravite collection "The Book of Masks." This is not to be confused with the 1921 essay of the same name, which I have also reviewed for Goodreads, but both "books of masks" serve as excellent further reading for those interested in Symbolist and Decadent writings.

Overall, you horror readers who like your literature on the side of the intellectual, the psychological, the bizarre, and the macabre will really want to read this, if not have it on your shelf. Do you dream like an Ed Gorey sketch? Does your dinner begin or end with a glass of Chartreuse, Herbsaint, or a sugar cube over a slotted spoon? Is at least one room in your house adorned in deep burgundy paisley wallpaper that you find yourself staring at for far too long on blustery nights? Have you ever uttered the name of Toulouse-Lautrec freely and fondly in conversation? Do you think masque balls are magical, and spend months preparing your yearly costume for Mardi Gras or Halloween? If you answered yes to any of these inquiries, you need to read this book.

WORD OF THE DAY: Egregore

[Seregil of Rhiminee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published at Risingshadow.

Because I recently read Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas (Tartarus Press, 2015) and was captivated by its decadent and dark atmosphere, I was eager to read Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker. I'm glad that I had an opportunity to read it, because it's an excellent shorty story collection.

Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker was a very pleasant and rewarding reading experience for me, because it was everything I expected it to be. It was a fascinatingly decadent, dark, hallucinatory, strange and captivating short story collection filled with beautiful and nuanced prose.

Jean Lorrain's Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker is a treasure trove of decadence and literary strange fiction to readers who want to read something out of the ordinary and are fascinated by decadence. It's great that Snuggly Books has re-published this difficult-to-find short story collection, because it has been out-of-print for a while now (it was previously published in English by Tartarus Press in 2002).

Because Jean Lorrain may be an unknown author to many readers, I think it's good to say a few words about him and his fiction. He was one of the leading figures of the Decadent Movement and a chronicler of the fin de siècle. Many of his works feature decadence and depravity in various ways.

Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker contains the following stories, which have been divided into five sections:

The Early Stories:

- The Egregore
- Funeral Oration
- The Locked Room
- Magic Lantern
- The Glass of Blood
- Beyond
- Glaucous Eyes

Sensations:

- One of Them
- An Undesirable Residence
- A Troubled Night
- A Posthumous Protest
- An Uncanny Crime
- The Holes in the Mask
- The Visionary
- The Possessed
- The Double

Souvenirs:

- The Toad
- Night-Watch
- The Spirit of the Ruins

Récits:

- Dolmance
- One January Night
- The Spectral Hand
- Prey to Darkness

Contes:

- The Princess of the Red Lilies
- The Princess at the Sabbat
- Narkiss
- The Princess aux Miroirs

The literary values of these stories are eternal, because they're beautifully written, grotesque, disturbing and wonderfully atmospheric stories that echo the way of life in the late 19th century France.

The contents of these stories range from literary fiction to literary strange fiction and from horror themed stories to fairy tales. Although I mentioned the word horror, I must emphasise that some of the stories are not your usual kind of horror stories, because the horror rises from a different source than normally. They're literary horror stories with an emphasis on atmosphere and strangeness. Some of the stories have intriguing gothic elements.

These stories explore French decadence in an atmospheric and memorable way. They highlight almost everything that decadence stands for, because Jean Lorrain doesn't shy away from decadent and depraved elements. The author paints a vivid and memorable picture of decadence and decadent way of life, because his stories are filled with unforgettable imagery ranging all the way from homosexual dandies and haunted houses to masked balls and etheromaniacs. Some of his descriptions are truly memorable and feature lush prose that shimmers with depravity, passion, eroticism and lust.

Here are my thoughts about some of the stories:

"The Egregore" is a fascinating account of a man who is affected by an Egregore. The story is wonderfully told by a man who watches the performance of a brother and a sister and tells his companion about the brother and how he is under the Egregore's influence.

In my opinion, "Funeral Oration" is a fascinatingly Poe-esque story. The author evokes vibrant images related to death and funerals with his stunning prose. He tells the story of a man who uses ether excessively and dies from its use.

"The Locked Room" has a charming feel of a classic ghost story. It is slightly reminiscent of the stories written by M.R. James and Edgar Allan Poe, but also differs from them. In this story, a man hears voices and music coming from the next room and is intrigued by them.

"The Glass of Blood" is a tale with lesbian and vampiric elements. It combines vampirism and different kind of sexuality in an interesting and slightly unusual way.

"One of Them" has a deep homosexual feel and undercurrent to it. The author's descriptions of the protagonist's feelings and lust are stunningly atmospheric and memorable.

"A Troubled Night" is an excellent account of a stormy night spent in a country-house. This story is so fascinatingly gothic that you can't help but be impressed by it. It has a certain Poe-esque feel to it.

"The Possessed" is a story about a man who has been addicted to ether. The man fears that is he'll become prey to a frightening obsession if he spends the winter where he is now. This is an excellent and well written story, because the author explores the man's fears in a gripping way.

"The Spirit of the Ruins" is an interesting and well written tale about a spirit of an old woman. It's one of the best stories of its kind.

"The Spectral Hand" will please readers who are fascinated by spectres and spectral manifestations. It's a fine ghost story.

"The Princess of the Red Lilies" is a well written fairy tale about Princess Audovere whose kisses give death. This story has a spellbindingly brutal atmosphere that thrilled me. The ending is fascinatingly macabre, but strangely beautiful.

"The Princess at the Sabbat" is also a well written fairy tale. It tells of Princess Ilse who loves nothing but herself. This story is a beautifully written account of vanity and its consequences. The ending is perfect and will linger on the reader's mind.

"Narkiss" and "The Princess aux Miroirs" are excellent stories with Egyptian elements. Both of them will please readers.

In order to fully understand and enjoy this short story collection, it's good to know at least a bit about Jean Lorrain and the era that he lived in, because his stories reflect his own way of life and experiences in an intriguing way. Because he embodied the absurdities, the paradoxes and the perversities of the decadent way of life and used ether, he was able to write these strange stories.

The introduction by the translator, Brian Stableford, sheds some light on the author's life and works, because it's an informative and well written introduction. Briand Stableford writes professionaly about Lorrain's ether-drinking, homosexuality, life and stories, and thus gives readers an intriguing glimpse into the author's extraordinary life.

What makes these stories especially intriguing is that although the author himself used ether, he writes about its dangers in some of the stories. He seems to have been aware of what its abuse can cause and how badly it can damage one's health, but used it anyway.

The stories in this collection feature different kinds of apparitions that may or may not be ether-induced visions. There's thought-provoking ambiguity in many of the stories that will be of special interest to speculative fiction readers.

Jean Lorrain examines decadence, sexuality, sensuality, moral corruption and other similar themes and issues in a bold and shameless way. He evokes a distinct sense of place and time, which is one of the reasons why these stories are so powerful and intriguing. When you read them, you're able to sense what the protagonists are going through and what kind of lives they live. The feel of a different era seeps through the text into the reader's mind.

Brian Stableford has done a magnificent job at translating Jean Lorrain's stories into English, because the prose is stunningly good. He has fully managed to convey the atmosphere and decadent nature of the stories to English-speaking readers who haven't read the original French stories.

Just like Monsieur de Phocas, this collection will strongly appeal to readers who are familiar with the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and Brendan Connell. I'm sure that it will also strongly appeal to readers who are fascinated by the stranger and hallucinatory side of literary fiction, because its contents often border on the line of being exquisitely strange and otherworldly.

I highly recommend Jean Lorrain's Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker to readers who enjoy reading beautifully written literary fiction and speculative fiction. It's a stunning feast of decadence and depravity from an author whose works need more publicity and recognition. Please, delve into this short story collection with an open mind and let yourself be ravished by literary prose and captivating strangeness. It's something unique and deeply mesmerising.

Highly recommended!

[César Lasso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se trata de una recopilación de relatos desasogadores, que reflejan las alucinaciones que sufren los adictos al éter que arrasó Francia en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. En efecto, este librito rinde culto a una droga, tal como lo hicieron antes de él Thomas de Quincey con el opio en su Confessions of an English Opium Eater y después de él Mohammed Mrabet con el hashish en su M'hashish.

Para una reseña en inglés más demorada, se puede consultar la del goodreader Glenn Russell en https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Fabrice del Dongo · Rating 5 out of 5]

aucune mention de Gustave Moreau (comment être sûrs que Jean Lorrain est bien l'auteur ???)
however g commencé et fini l'année avec JLo mais quelle star vrmt ma révélation de 2025 le man ne déçoit jamais, il écrit que des zinzineries en pur dialogue avec mon esprit malade et c 1 absolue diva pourrissante (je continue de penser qu'un 8e de mon être est composé des atomes de la fin de siècle crazyness de ce brave JLo prove me wrong)

2026 je me mets à boire de l'éther pour encore + de rêves fiévreux !!!!!! (et hop 1 résolution facile autre que "lift 10x mon poids à la salle et courir 7 marathons")

[Temucano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sueños producidos por la droga, donde abundan personajes horripilantes, larvales y babosos, todos ellos seres normales alterados por la película sedante del peligroso éter. Lorrain fluye como pez en el agua entre estos estanques de vicio y decadencia, ofreciendo perturbadoras imágenes junto a deliciosos tintes de poesía macabra.

Respecto a los relatos destaco tres: "Los agujeros de la máscara" algo único, de lo más decadente, tétrico y exquisito que existe; "Una noche turbulenta", locura de historia, con esos pájaros horripilantes que acosan al eterómano; y "El poseído", otro cuento insano lleno de caras de zorro, reptiles lujuriosos y serpientes avariciosas. En general tiene párrafos notables, habré anotado varios de ellos en mi libretilla de delirios particulares.

Por suerte me queda "El maleficio", a la espera de una época más perversa para destapar sus efluvios.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early Stories:

The Egregore
Funeral Oration
The Locked Room
Magic Lantern
The Glass of Blood
Beyond
Glaucous Eyes

•••

Sensations:

One of Them
An Undesirable Residence
A Troubled Night
A Posthumous Protest
An Uncanny Crime
The Visionary
The Possessed
The Double

•••

Souvenirs:

The Toad
Night-Watch
The Spirit of the Ruins

Recits:

Dolmance
One January Night
The Spectral Hand
Prey to Darkness

Contes:

The Princess of the Red Lilies
The Princess at the Sabbat
The Princess aux Miroirs

[Gala · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me aburrí muchísimo y nunca me interesó nada de lo que contaba :'( Pensé que me iba a gustar.

[Rob Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 stars] Phantasmagoric and disturbing hallucinatory impressions of late 19th c. Paris, some orientalist fantasy, and then a nod to the fairy tale tradition in the last ‘contes cruels’, though many of these short works feel more like a sketch than a fleshed-out story. Some like “Glaucous Eyes” rise above and are memorably chilling. Lorrain casts a certain spell when his prose doesn’t get TOO purple, as in two of the longest, purely imaginative works here, set in ancient Egypt, which close the volume.

Most of these pieces were written for the papers of the day in the feuilleton tradition, though not as serials. Worth a look for fans of the author; if you’re new to him, you must first read his full length novel “Errant Vice” and go from there; he’s certainly one of the best writers of the fin-de-siècle French Decadents, and a highly original voice. Brian Stableford also makes a great translator. He is responsible for bringing this and several other Lorrain titles back into print in English, in nicely mounted, pretty cleanly edited editions through his imprint Snuggly Books, in what is clearly a labor of love. It appears Lorrain’s only other novel “Monsieur de Phocas” is out of print and obscenely expensive second-hand. I hope Stableford reissues that too, in another fine edition.

[WillemC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een selectie decadente vertellingen die hier en daar zelfs letterlijk hun inspiratiebronnen vermelden (Huysmans, Poe, Sade, ...) en zich vaak afspelen in nachtelijke kamers en duistere straatjes. Verval, ziekte en hallucinatie staan centraal in deze verhalen die worden bevolkt door etheromanen, sadisten, lelijke misvormde dieren, spoken en stervenden. Veel regen en schimmel, interieurs rijkelijk met oude en vervallen glorie aangekleed, verlicht door kaarsen. Wereldschokkend is dit niet, maar zeer leuk leesvoer voor donkere avonden. Voor liefhebbers van Huysmans, J.I. de Haan, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, ... Het na jaren herlezen meer dan waard. Enkel het lange "Ophelius" kon me minder overtuigen. 4.5/5!

"Wie? de ooievaars natuurlijk, de trap staat er vol van. O! met lange bekken en kropgezwellen!"

"Zijn ogen waren halfopen en toch sliep hij, een beetje schuim op zijn blauwe rottende lippen, schuim dat roze leek bij het licht van de waakvlam. Uit zijn mond en neus kwam een geur van ether en chloroform, een weeë geur van de tyfuskoorts."

"[...] de portretten van de laatste Habsburgers, gedegenereerde lelijkheid van een groot ras dat vervallen is tot de wilde doodsdrift van de primitieven."

[Francesca Penchant · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The imperishable mystery of the masque, attractive and repulsive at the same time, demonstrates the techniques and the key images—and, above all, the imperious need—according to which certain individuals, on appointed days, contrive to make themselves up, to disguise themselves, to change their identity and to cease to be that which they are: in a word, to escape themselves.

“What instincts, what appetites, what hopes, what lusts, what maladies of the soul underlie the gaudily coloured cardboard of false chins and false noses, the horsehair of false beards, the shimmering satin of black masks, the white cloth of hooded cloaks? What intoxication of hashish or morphine, what loss of self, what equivocal and evil adventure, precipitates that lamentable and grotesque procession of dominos and penitents on the days when masked balls are held?”

Decadent writers, such as Jean Lorrain, describe strange and obscure thoughts and feelings that I thought only I had.

[Persona · Rating 1 out of 5]

Que conste que es solo una opinión personal y entiendo que el libro perfectamente tenga su publico pero a mi no me ha hecho prácticamente nada (incluso he tenido en cuenta cuando salio y también la vida del autor).

Pienso que se pierde demasiado en descripciones y palabras rimbombantes y no consigue, al menos para mi, meterme en lo que quiere contar. En muchas ocasiones intentaba entrar en la atmósfera pero me tiraba atrás con demasiado relleno que no me interesaba demasiado y quería que se enfocara un poco mas en aportar un poco mas de "terror" al libro. Se que la base de cada historieta esta en el elemento del Eter y lo que "provoca" pero no se, me ha parecido muy flojo.

Así que le dejo esta nota porque si que quería valorar al menos el trabajo que hay escrito (es decir, que esta bien escrito).

[Sam Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autumnal malaise. Music learned from the lips of portraits. Delirium. I love it.

[Colm Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

We love drug induced horror stories

[Andreas Jacobsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Since I am writing something where ether plays a prominent role, I was intrigued to read this, not least because of the evocative title, but also since it is published by Snuggly Books, whose output I generally like (the neo-decadent stuff certainly).

So surely (surely!), I would find little nuggets of inspiration; insights about the nature of ether consumption, perspectives from the partaker's experience (I have not tried it myself and do not plan to), a vivid description, a well-versed line to sneakily borrow. Surely, right?

No. Somehow not.

This was initially my main frustration with the book. It simply does not deliver on the title. There is not a lot of ether in her at all, and when it appears, it is written of in the most general and mundane terms, not at all leading me to the assumption that the author himself was an addict with bags of experience with this strange drug. He was though. Which left me confused as to how he could only describe it in the most banal terms possible.

Well. Far be it from me to judge the entire work poorly because it did not meet my particular need! Heh... well. This is where my frustration is taken to another level.

Even ignoring the lack of ether presence, I did not care for these stories.

These are not ether stories. They are, in my humblest of humble opinions (lol) mostly a selection of ineffective horror stories, obnoxious decadent stories, tired Gothic tableaux, and facsimiles of fairy tales.
Of course, the tropes would not have been as well-trodden at the time as they are today. But even so, I found it very hard to ignore how many cliches and utterly formulaic story structures were ever present.

SO MANY of the stories follow the same premise, where a character in a seemingly normal setting encounters something unsettling. A person sees a ghost. The end. A young woman sees a frog, it is unusually ugly. The end. I found there to be a distinct lack of variation in the ways the uncanny elements appeared, which got very tiresome very quickly. A poor imitation of Edgar Allen Poe on repeat.

Concurrently, a lot of the stories were more in the decadent tradition.
Dandys and aristocrats discussing artists or other aristocrats. Eye-roll-inducing quantity of name-dropping, mostly French noblemen of the time and some more or less known painters. In one story, two men have an uninteresting discussion about a short story by ETA Hoffman, and my main thought for the duration was "Well I would rather read the story they are talking about than this dross"...

And then, there is the language. Sigh. At times the prose was truly purple, in the unintentionally laughable way. In particular, a long description of "phallic" flowers in the most excruciatingly heightened language made me want to choke on one of those penis-shaped Peonies.

To try to get a bit more out of this, I watched Jean Rollins' 1979 film adaptation ('Fascination') of one of the stories in here. A stylish 70's euro-arthouse gothic horror about a fleeing criminal running into a covenant of horny vampire chicks. Lots of nudity, sex, blood and gothic imagery. It it mostly set in an ancient castle. So. Yeah. It had one memorable scene where the Grim Reaper is a semi-nude woman wielding the scythe, cutting peoples throats and stabbing the eyes of a woman. It made no sense, but it was cool to look at.
Hilariously, I could not for the life of me remember anything that should stem from the story in the book. And re-reading it, I remembered nothing more than how the story had left no indelible mark on my mind, and reading it a second time, it still didn't.

All in all, I hoped for so much more. But all the styles and genre stories here, I have read better examples of somewhere else. Lorrain is not a master of any of these. Poe does horror better, Stoker does Vampirism better, and Huysmans does decadence better. So he felt to me more of a jack-of-all-trades, not excelling in anything. He has had an influence though, and I am being a bit harsh, given that it would have been less cliched at the time of writing. Still, I can not give this more than 2 stars. Would only recommend it to the most starch fans of decadence and classic ghost stories.

[Vittoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pensavo meglio, sono raccontini molto semplici e scontati, spesso senza una vera conclusione... E' come se Lorrain avesse voluto mischiare le trame alla Poe con le atmosfere alla Wilde ma non riesce minimamente ad avvicinarsi alla loro grandezza.

[Pablo Del · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colección de cuentos adscritos a la corriente decadentista francesa y cuyo hilo conductor en todos ellos es la presencia más o menos visible de la droga del éter, tan en boga por los años finiseculares del XIX. En general los sucesos de los distintos relatos son producto de monomanías, neurosis y alucinaciones de sus protagonistas (destacando entre estos 'Los orificios de la máscara' y 'El poseído'), pero también los hay que juegan con la ambigüedad o el terror psicológico ('Un crimen desconocido' o 'La mano enguantada' por ejemplo), e incluso hallamos auténticas divagaciones o ensoñaciones (véase 'El visionario'). A lo largo de los cuentos aparecerán algunos personajes, como Serge Allitof o de Jacquels, los cuales testimoniarán o sufrirán diferentes experiencias que los abocará a finales diversos. Además con ello se dota a esta colección de cierta linealidad narrativa más allá del leitmotiv del éter.

Lorrain maneja con bastante soltura la narración corta, no cae en excesivos alambicamientos aunque no por ello deja de mostrar pequeños pasajes de la prosa descriptiva que resultan una delicia; con respecto a las tramas encabezadas por los eterómanos desquiciados, habida cuenta de que él mismo sufrió de dicha adicción, resultan verosímiles y llega a hacer reflexionar sobre cuánto habrá de sus propias experiencias en los renglones. Así pues estamos ante una joyita repleta de sombras escalofriantes que bien gustará a los amantes del cuento en general, y podrá maravillar a los ávidos lectores de la literatura finisecular.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Lorrain's short stories touching on experiences of ether, for which he was well known. The first few of these read like grotesques, given to building up to moments of haunting panic in some way sparked by ether use, and it's in these earlier stories that you feel like you're getting stories meant to portray the effects of that drug on the writers' mind. I could've skipped most of the middle stories, but The Princess of the Red Lillies and Narkiss are a couple of the best told Decadent fairy tales I've read, rife with fawning description and fascination with characters of mythological excess and erotic cruelty that gave Lorrain and his cohorts the aesthetic they're known for.

[rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice look at the tip of the sickle, the fin de siecle, from the voice phased in ether, Lorrain. I mostly got tired of the draught, the stories without the sauce are the best, like "The Spirit of the Ruins " or "The Spectral Hand", where the decorated wit of the characters is more delirious with action or reaction and not just passive; more of faerie than of zombie. The intro was a good read too, providing us with a sad start that I think is key in feeling the melancholy of the earliest stories. Even the tide can go out to reveal hidden bells bells bells.

[Woolrich13 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of nightmarish vignettes and some supernatural horror from an eccentric but brilliant French Decadent of the era of the 1890s and early 1900s and all ably translated by Professor Brian Stableford.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost too good to be true.

[LayDownYourSoul · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The thirst for new sensations now extends to horrors!'

Atmospheric, decadent, and shocking.

A pleasant surprise, particularly the first two sections. I had read that there are only a couple of actual ether nightmares among these stories, and was worried that the rest would be generic or repetitive. But there ended up being more variety and originality than I had expected, and I enjoyed some of the other stories more than the nightmares themselves.

Ether was still lurking in many of the early stories; for example in the motif where a smell of ether is found at scenes of strange events, or the narrator thinks they smell ether in the falling of new snow, which I enjoyed a lot.

There was great imagery and concepts throughout - the Egregore and the visual representation of it feeding was one that stuck with me.

Was a little sceptical that I could actually be shocked by an artist trying to be shocking, but writing more than 100 years ago. But there were points that were genuinely disturbing. For example, a young girl becomes sick as she's preyed on by an older woman, and rather than end the relationship takes daily trips to an abattoir to drink fresh baby cow blood, to relieve her symptoms?! Very disgusting, pretty effective. There were several references to the even earlier Marquis de Sade, which helped contextualise the vintage "depravity" against my somewhat closed-minded assumption that certain behaviours are more modern inventions.

Enjoyed seeing the influences of other authors, such as "Edgar Poe" and E.T.A. Hoffmann - adding to my already too-long reading list. And some possibly very direct influence from Poe in one of the "nightmare" stories. Was also very cool seeing the LGBT themes, especially when they weren't as predatory as the story previously mentioned. For example, the creation of a demon like an incubus or succubus, but exclusively targeting members of the same sex.

Very well edited collection, really enjoyed the detailed introduction and footnotes. Had no idea the author lived such an interesting life and crossed paths with so many other authors in such unusual ways. Was also interesting learning about the culture of the time and place, where Mardi Gras and masked balls were common.

My favourite stories were probably:
- Glaucous Eyes: great concept, very atmospheric and well told story
- The Egregore: fantastic imagery around the attack of the psychic vampire
- The Holes in the Mask: very Poe-esque nightmare

Some quotes I liked:
'I was dead and I... "And you've been drinking ether again"'
'Have you ever noticed the almost-imperceptible perfume of ether that emerges from fresh snow? Snow has an effect on me that is similar to the effect of ether'
'Is fear contagious? Do hallucinations develop naturally in certain situations?'
'Never in any era, not even the Middle Ages, when the mandrake shrieked in the middle of every night beneath the frightful dew dripping from the gallows - never has the Fantastic flourished, so sinister and so terrifying, as in modern life!'

[LaShana Claude]

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The orders of life for men are different than those for women. Flamboyancy island. Cover procludes Mark as a nineteen year old with no ambitions of meeting Solomon, lutein or a loquat tree that might reveal the truth about his Panamanian waters.

In his authoroitative introduction Brian Stableford presents Lorrain as one of the select band of literary figures "whose life and art were bound together into the most seamless whole. He was the man who embodied, more intimately and more inescapably than any other, the absurdities, affections, paradoxes and perversities of the Decadent style and the Decadent world-view."

[Titanio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Colección de cuentos que están atravesados como el título lo indica por el consumo de éter. La mayoría de ellos transcurre en habitaciones cerradas, donde el protagonista se ve acechado por una presencia inquietante de origen incierto. La explicación final a veces ambigua, es el consumo de la sustancia. Más que relatos, diría que son descripciones de experiencias que supongo, son reales de la vida de Lorrain, el cual era adicto, como un diario de alucinaciones. El resultado es interesante, pero repetitivo y de alguna manera la transmisión de una vivencia personal aterradora que al ser contada pierde parte de su gracia. 6/10

[Certified Not-Lame · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Egregore - 3
Funeral Oration - 4
The Locked Room - 4
Magic Lantern - 4
A Glass Of Blood - 4
Beyond - 3
Glaucous Eyes - 3
One Of Them Or The Spirit Of The Mask - 4
An Undesirable Residence - 3
A Troubled Night - 4
A Posthumous Protest - 4
An Uncanny Crime - 4
The Holes In The Mask - 3
The Visionary - 4
The Possessed - 3
The Double - 3
The Toad - 4
Night-Watch - 4
The Spirit Of The Ruins - 4
Dolmance - 3
One January Night - 3
The Spectral Hand - 3
Prey To Darkness - 4
The Princess Of The Red Lilies - 4
The Princess At The Sabbat - 4
Narkiss - 3
The Princess Aux Miroirs - 4