Waystations of the Deep Night

by Marcel Brion, George MacLennan (Introduction), Edward Gauvin (Translator)

First published in France in the dark year of 1942, the story collection Waystations of the Deep Night remains the best known of Marcel Brion’s numerous works in the vein of the strange and the fantastic. The journeys in this volume carry the reader through the surreal vistas of an underground city that appears aboveground as a bizarre theater of facades and a fire-ravaged landscape where souls turn to ash. By playing with the format of the ghost story or horror tale, Brion transforms the romantic waystations in this volume into stages on an inward journey into lucid dreams and no less lucid nightmares.

Waystations evokes a deep night of strange encounters, enigmatic transformations, and labyrinthine journeys. A young castrato sings his heart out in a lost baroque garden; a timeless warrior retires from battle to an uncanny final resting place; a child falls under the fateful spell of an enchanted painting; a traveler in a burned-out landscape encounters the Prince of Death; dancing cats engage in mortal combat in the cellars of an abandoned port city. These stories give substance to Brion’s claim that "the fantastic comes to us in the great tidal waves of night, phosphorescent plankton drawn by dark waves that break on humanity as soon as the sun of evidence and reason has disappeared."

A self-declared heir of Achim von Arnim and E. T. A. Hoffmann, Brion was also an admirer of the German Romantic writer Novalis and his Hymns to the Night, but his own imaginative homages to the night are more troublingly ambiguous, possibly an indirect reflection of the dark times in which they were written.

Over the course of a long and productive career, Marcel Brion (1895–1984) published twenty novels, four volumes of short stories, and sixty-eight nonfiction books covering music, art, literature, history, and travel, and a large number of shorter essays and editorial introductions.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, Literature, France, Surreal

178 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Marcel Brion (1895, Marseille - 1984, Paris) was a French essayist, literary critic, novelist, and historian.

The son of a lawyer, Brion was classmates in Thiers with Marcel Pagnol and Albert Cohen. After completing his secondary education in Champittet, Switzerland, he studied law at the Faculty of Aix-en-Provence. Counsel to the bar of Marseille between 1920 and 1924, he abandoned his legal career to turn to literature.

Brion wrote nearly a hundred books in his career, ranging from historical biography to examinations of Italian and German art, and turning later in life to novels. His most famous collection of stories is the 1942 Les Escales de la Haute Nuit (The Shore Leaves Of The Deepest Night). An essay of Brion appears in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, the important 1929 critical appreciation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

He was a friend of the philosopher Xavier Tilliette.

In 1964, Brion was elected to the French Academy chair 33, replacing his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. Other distinctions include membership in the Légion d'honneur, the Croix de guerre 1914-1918, a Grand Officer in the French Ordre national du Mérite, and an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

His son, Patrick Brion, critic and film historian, is the "voice" of Cinema midnight on France 3.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a curious literary career Marcel Brion had. After a few years of practicing law in his twenties, Brion abruptly quit the legal trade and began traveling around while writing full-time. Much of his earlier output was focused on history, art, biography, and literary criticism. He also began writing fiction, primarily short stories, many of which culminated in this and one other collection. He mostly dropped fiction during the years of WWII and returned to historical and critical writing, until after the war finally turning his attention back to fiction—working exclusively on novels until his death in 1984. All told he published a mind-boggling 17 novels, and a total of almost 100 books over his lifetime. And yet apparently his fiction is not much read today in France, and this early collection of stories published by Wakefield Press is the only fiction of his to be translated into English thus far.

The question I have is why. Why do we not have more Brion in translation and why has it taken so long just for this sole book to appear. This is a phenomenal collection that forges a torchlit pathway through and around the crossroads of Gothic, Expressionist, Surrealist, and German Romantic literature (Brion also wrote the definitive four-volume study of this latter movement). Brion belongs in the company of writers such as Julien Gracq, Hans Henny Jahnn, Bruno Schulz, Marcel Béalu, Jean Ray (mostly in terms of Malpertuis), and the more contemporary Eric Basso. These writers straddled styles and genres, methodically toeing the line between reality and unreality, blurring dream and waking life to the point where it doesn’t even matter whether you really know which is which. And they did it with style—each unique to their own mystical and secretive predilections. The reader surrenders—almost uncontrollably so—to the sway of the prose.

Brion melds aspects of the literary movements mentioned above into a highly lucid yet ornate style that never strays into the verbose. Each word feels as if it’s been chosen with great care (and mad props go to the translating team of George MacLennan and Edward Gauvin for a masterful translation and to MacLennan for the excellent introduction and afterword). The collection is very well organized, with a pleasing flow to the stories as they subtly transition between styles and themes. Many of Brion’s stories are narrated by anonymous itinerants driven by curiosity to observe but reluctant to fully participate in the action of the stories. A few are also written in third person, and have a distinctly different feel to them. Here is the rundown:

‘Waystations of the Deep Night’ – a powerful first story that sets the bar for the collection quite high. A man arrives in a strange town, and driven by some ambiguous motivation, sets off to investigate, while reluctantly accepting the assistance of a pair of persistent guides. I hesitate to reveal too much, as part of the appeal of the story lies in the originality of its unfolding. This one felt like it displayed the most overt surrealist imagery.

‘The Field Marshal of Fear’ – a military-themed story in which the narrator observes a mass retreat of soldiers in odd multicolored attire, after which he returns with a grizzled old officer to a makeshift barracks in a country barn. Eventually the titular Marshal arrives, and the military setting melts away as the three men travel into a cavernous mansion of dreamlike proportions. The military setting and gothic flourishes brought Gracq to mind here.

‘The Fire Sonata’ – this was the only story in the collection that didn't impress me. The narrator shares a train compartment with a retired violinist-showman known for his act The Fire Sonata, which evokes hell through its flaming props and masked ‘demon’ sidemen. The musician’s name is Oreste Pignabocchi and the story consists of him telling the narrator in a roundabout way why he no longer performs his act.

‘Incident on a Journey’ – mostly written in third person (with a few dips into first-person that MacLennan addresses in his afterword), this tale felt the most allegorical. A traveler huddled on a volcano-blasted alien landscape is approached by a passing horseman, who offers him bread and wine. Getting a bad vibe from the rider, the traveler declines the repast despite his parched and hungry state, as well as turns down a ride into town. Yet shortly afterwards he does take a ride from an intriguing pair who pass by in a mule-drawn coach. Once in town he leaves the couple and enters an inn, where he meets an interesting pair of men: a younger one who has survived being burned at the stake, but lost his soul in the process, and an older one who feels every tremble of the earth throughout his body, no matter where on the planet it occurs. Brion employs an interesting nested approach to this story. It also includes some of the most sublime passages in the book—Brion really excels in his descriptions of landscapes and settings.

‘Dead Waters’ – this is the longest and perhaps most enigmatic story. The action takes place throughout the course of one single night. The narrator arrives in a port city and has the night to pass before leaving on a ship the next day. While out strolling he encounters an old acquaintance named Petersen. Brion is quite coy in how he reveals the nature of the relationship between the narrator and Petersen, eventually doing so through use of a clever bit of metafictional artifice. I got a strong Hans Henny Jahnn vibe from this story. It too includes some breathtaking passages:

The night acquired some sort of suspicious, slightly nauseating sweetness. The hour was approaching when men who are unable to sleep begin to impatiently await the cool wind of dawn. The insipid sweetness that clung to the skin rose up from the canals where, from time to time, rats swam, surrounded by phosphorescent rings; it oozed from uninhabited houses whose gables almost touched above the street at certain points, it fell from the sky where a sluggish moon was apathetically pushing its way through the clouds littering its path.

‘La Capitana’ – this story represents what felt like a natural transition in the collection to the final three stories, which while all still not exactly uplifting in nature, are a bit more buoyant in their style and less drastic in their dark themes. In this story a young boy becomes enthralled with a painted tapestry of a pirate ship hanging on the wall of the salon in his family’s home. The narrative is imbued with a ponderous, gauzy aura. With exquisite language Brion perfectly captures the experience of a youthful solitary existence, and in particular the magical, talismanic associations drawn from certain everyday objects around us. Who can say what it is that draws us to these objects as children. It is as if they speak to the primal, universal undercurrent coursing through us. And how open we are to that as children! Brion clearly cherishes this and captures it here in glowing tones. Reading the story is a full sensorial experience, as Brion conjures the intensity of childhood feeling in a hypnotic manner.

‘The Glass Organ’ – this is written in a similar style as ‘La Capitana’, although with more of a gothic tone to it. It’s a tragic ‘ghost’ story of sorts. In this tale the narrator visits a friend’s estate and while out walking one night witnesses an epic vision play out on the lawn in front of the house. The nature of the events in the vision relate to a family story told to the narrator by his friend. Elements of this story have a direct correlation to significant experiences in Brion’s own life and I would say it shows in the passion of the storytelling. I also suspect this could similarly be the case with the preceding story. Again there are some stunning passages in this story, including this one when the narrator is out on the grounds and encounters a topiary labyrinth:

I recognized a maze by the sharp perfume of box that sealed in its mysterious walls, and I felt a desire to lose myself in that vegetal labyrinth whose smell evoked a disquieting excursion into uncharted territory. For, at a given moment, the game of losing and then finding oneself again culminated in that exquisite agony wherein we no longer wish to discover the central mystery of those tangled corridors, where even the need to escape from their moving confines has abandoned us. As though the perfect gratuitousness of a quest that no longer seeks a center or an exit was content with this walk savoring of the infinite, where the tiresome passage through the same places holds for us nothing less than an affirmation: the consoling futility of the eternal return.

’The Lost Street’ – the final story, which in some ways feels slight and anticlimactic, although it is a fine story on its own. MacLennan also posits an interesting interpretation of this closing story as a symbolic transition in thematic focus to that of Brion’s later novels. In this tale the narrator is staying at the house of some friends on a mostly abandoned street of a nameless city. He starts hearing strange noises at night and decides to investigate, without telling his hosts of his activities. Brion does a good job of crafting the surroundings here and for me the story conjured up the settings of Bruno Schulz (and those found in the work of the Brothers Quay). This story ultimately deals with the possibility of a parallel world, and it’s an interesting take on this not uncommon (and usually welcome to me) trope.

I don’t think I could have been more pleased with this collection. Even by Wakefield’s high standards it is excellent. It’s by far the best collection of short fiction I’ve read in recent memory, considering elements of consistency in style, theme, and language use. In Brion’s writing I see echoes of many of my favorite writers and yet he remains totally unique. With great anticipation then I await the translation into English of any (or dare I dream, all) of his 17 novels.

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recall a night. It was probably 1982, if I've triangulated correctly. In Bellevue, Nebraska, a suburb of Omaha. My friend Ray and I were staying at our friend Shawn's house. Shawn's dad was kind of a celebrity to us. He had a killer conversion van (though, unfortunately, no barbarians painted on the side), a copy of Rush's 2112 in the tape deck, and he knew the guitar player from REO Speedwagon. Pretty cool to us 13 year olds!

Back then, young teenagers were pretty "free range". I recall Saturdays and summer days where I would ride my bike for hours, covering many miles, just sort of going from place to place, running into friends, creating adventures. There were no helicopter parents back then. At least I didn't know any. Needless to say, Shawn's dad was not a helicopter parent. We stayed out in the conversion van, listening to Rush while playing Tunnels & Trolls, with no adult influence whatsoever. It was bliss.

When it comes to exact details of that night, I can only recall a couple. After finishing our T&T session, we went out for a nighttime stroll. It was one of those strangely surreal nights where the three of us seemed like the only people out on the streets. We went to Top Dog Hot Dog for the arcade games as much as for the hot dogs. I recall playing Moon Patrol, Zaxxon (I still suck at that game), and then playing the Centaur pinball game (still my favorite board) until they closed at about 11 PM.

Then, we wandered. I can't tell you where all we went and what all we did, though I am certain it involved a lot of trespassing and maybe some breaking and entering.

What I can tell you about is the feeling I had. Did I mention that we had stayed awake the entire night before that night? No? It's true, we had been awake for close to 36 hours straight before the night began. For those of you who have done this, first of all, don't continue. I have first-hand experience of a loved one becoming temporarily psychotic and having to be hospitalized in the psych-clinic due to lack of sleep. It's terrifying to see from the outside. I wonder if I hadn't experienced something similar that night. How could I know? When you're in the middle of psychosis, your thoughts seem pretty logical (even hyper-logical, to coin a term) to you.

I want to say there was a dulling of the senses, but "dulling" doesn't describe what I felt. It was more a compartmentalizing of the senses. The "I" in "me" was one step removed. I heard things, but it was as if it was from a distance. Vision came as if from a television or movie screen. Even my own voice felt like it emanated from somewhere outside or "behind" me. It was summer, but my skin felt numbed. A high-pitched whining continually sounded from the back of my skull.

And I felt like anything was possible. Everything, though one step removed from my senses, was alive and full of potential. I wouldn't have been surprised by a miracle, and wouldn't have been taken aback by the end of the world.

Since then, I've had a few other experiences late, late at night that I won't detail here. There is some kind of physiological and psychological reaction to the deep night that makes each of those experiences to feel "of a piece," as they say. And the same is true of the stories in Marcel Brion's excellent Waystations of the Deep Night.

The title story is exactly what you would expect from such a title: an oneiric tale straight out of a de Chirico painting. I'm honestly shocked that the Brothers Quay haven't done a short film based on this story. It would be a perfect fit, as Brion's painterly prose is beautifully imagistic. Or is that magicistic? Borderline majestic. It's everything I hoped for, judging by the title. Dark and refulgent, at once.

"The Field Marshal of Fear" is a quiet, somber piece, but steady as marching feet. The short, simple sentences, however, do not fail to evoke a stupendous sadness, an eternal drudgery experienced by the dead veterans of wars long since won or lost. A graveside sleepwalk, full of night's heaviness.

In "The Fire Sonata," Brion's voice reminds me of Calvino, but with a sinister edge much sharper and darker than anything the Italian master wrote. I had to split this story into two readings, and I had high expectations for the concluding read. My expectations were met and then some! This could have been an episode of the Twilight Zone that Rod Serling would have been proud of. That's the highest praise, coming from me, as TZ is my favorite shoe of all time.

I would swear David Lynch had written "Incident on a Journey," had I not read it in this collection. The ending came as no surprise, but the inevitability of the tale made it all the more uncomfortable and awkward, like you know you're walking into a trap, but there is no way to avoid it, so you take in every excruciating detail and just watch in desperate silence as the void closes in on you, closer and closer.

Though it could be read merely as a fabulously well-written eerie tale (in the Fisherian sense), "Dead Waters" is, pardon the pun, much deeper than that. It's a story primarily about agency, manipulation, creation, and causality, with many of the characters being potentially marionettes or God Himself, or neither. There are no clear answers, but plenty of compelling questions about what transpires on dark streets. This was the most blatantly "dreamlike" story in the collection, and a deeply-intriguing read.

"La Capitana" is a child's long, slow fading into a dream-world of potential adventure beyond the seas. It is simultaneously happy and sad, bittersweet, full of hope and, yet, utterly hopeless. Imagine your eight-year-old self on a boring, sunny afternoon, given the power to disappear into mysterious dreams of exotic lands on a ship named "La Capitana," a name that you gave the ship, because it is yours, in dream.

"The Glass Organ" was every bit as ephemeral and strange as the object in the title implies. It is a multi-faceted story, but tenuous, images slipping onto one another, transforming into a world that may or may not exist.

"The Lost Street" is a more traditional ghost story. I use the word "more" intentionally, as it is not a fully-traditional ghost story. There are enough more surreal elements that take this beyond the realm of, say M.R. James and approach Bruno Schulz by way of Dali.

Overall, Brion's stories evoked a visceral familiarity within me, feelings I've felt mostly when I've had too little sleep (day or night) and some of the oddities of life in the deep night. Here's sampling of what I mean - Brion describes it much better than I do, from the story "The Glass Organ":

That nocturnal stroll through a park that merged imperceptibly with the forest - certain domestic trees having recovered their wild freedom - already contained within it the qualities of a labyrinth. I didn't choose paths. When several opened before me, I accepted now the darkest, with the childlike hope of encountering a marvelous creature, now the brightest, for the pleasing reward of a downpour of moonlight like a narrow stream between the serried darkness of the trees. Concerns about time or direction would have diminished the sense of the unreal that I received from the night. To let myself be carried along by it, to consent to the paths it offered me, ah! the sheer bliss of no longer choosing. What did it matter if dawn overtook me in the middle of the forest or at the first houses of a distant village? The joy of abandoning myself to the indefinite character that moonlight bestows on deeds and things ruled out any directed action on my part. There was nothing I sought, nothing I fled. For several hours I was at peace with myself, relinquishing both desire and regret, indifferent to wherever, in the end, I must inevitably arrive, not caring whether that place was one of fulfillment or one of oblivion.

This is how it feels to flee into the deep night.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

for now: my many and HUGE thanks to Wakefield for publishing this book.
absolutely exquisite; I didn't want this book to ever end. Best for readers who appreciate truly GREAT prose and weird-moving-toward-surreal stories that tend to keep you off balance for the duration. I LOVED THIS BOOK.

more to come next week.

[Autoclette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Narcotic, sonambulisms of the highest order.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this is not on your to-read list after S̶e̶a̶n̶'s review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), why not?

I'm not always in the mood for this kind of fiction, with Brion's prose flourishes and leisurely, dreamlike ambulatory journeys, but I enjoyed the stronger pieces here. I can't add much to S̶e̶a̶n̶'s review, but this excerpt from the title story shouldn't give away too much:

When the doll had been completely undressed, the little girl delicately rubbed its limbs together, as if massaging them, and then tossed the doll into the water. At first it sank, sending out ripples, and then returned to the surface as if buoyed by a phosphorescent light rising from the depths of the sea, though perhaps the light emanated from the doll itself. It spun, drifted, surrendering to the whim of the tides, and suddenly, spreading its arms and legs, it started to swim.

"The Field Marshal of Fear" takes a bit longer to pick up steam. But the eventual dreamlike journey is also nicely done.

I agree with S̶e̶a̶n̶ on "The Fire Sonata". It seems pretty old-fashioned and predictable. I wish "Incident On A Journey" didn't take so long to get going. I was getting pretty impatient with the ornate descriptions of the volcanic landscape, but the carriage ride was dream-like and peppered with intriguing detail. The double arrival at the inn was superbly disorienting. The ending works, though I would have preferred something more low-key.

"Dead Waters" is probably my favorite, after the title story. We're never sure about the relationship between the protagonist and his acquaintance, as they converse elusively and wander over the unnamed city in search of cat fights (!) and other dreamlike wonders. I'm less enthusiastic about the last three stories, but they were entertaining enough. Roughly 3.5 stars.

I just noticed one of the translators is Edward Gauvin, who also translated Chateaureynaud's only collection in English, A Life on Paper: Selected Stories. I highly recommend this collection, and have been looking for Chateaureynaud in English. According to this post:

http://www.edwardgauvin.com/?page_id=601

there's more coming from Wakefield, listed as "forthcoming" on Wakefield's website. The post has lots of other Chateaureynaud links, to keep us fans busy in the meantime.

[Julien Ligne 4 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stuff of course, almost like Ligotti 40 years early. "Les Eaux mortes" is the real deal.

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of opulent and imaginative meditations on one of my very favorite themes: the subjective experience of night. Everything in this is moon-drunk and star-lit. Really extraordinary.

[Ed Erwin]

I very much enjoyed "La corne de corail" which I found in a (very uneven) French collection La Dimension fantastique - 3 and wanted to try more from this author.

There is a lot of variety in style here. A few stories could be called "Weird" literature. But mostly I'd say they have a "Gothic" feel. A bit like Poe or Hoffmann.

I still want more. He wrote a lot, mostly nonfiction, often about German "Romantic" literature, but also plenty of his own stories. Sadly, it isn't easy to find most of that, and this book is the only collection in English. I got a kindle free sample of the start of one of the novels in French. I like it, but I'm getting lazy about reading in French so I want more translations!

Here is a snippet I find interesting from the afterword from one of the two translators:

For reasons that are far from evident, the period 1939-1945 saw the emergence in France and Belgium of a minor but distinctively Francophone variety of la littérature fantastique in the work of Jean Ray, Marcel Béalu, and Marcel Brion. None of these writers were aware of each other at the time, but all were indebted to the fantastic literature of German Romanticism while at the same time aware of the avant-garde developments of Expressionism and Surrealism. In France, the first selections of Béalu's micro-stories, Mémoires de l'ombre (Memories of darkness), appeared in 1941 and 1944; then in 1945, came his major novel The Experience of the Night. Brion published his first two story collections in 1941 and 1942 respectively, and further relevant stories also date from this period. Turning to Belgium, only a few of Jen Ray's prolific writings can be grouped with those of his French peers, but it's a significant few: "Aux lisières des ombres" (On the margins of darkness, ca. 1940) is a radically dark and bizarre novella, part of an intended longer work that was left unfinished, published only posthumously in 1995; Malpertuis, the novel for which he is best known, was published in 1943.

What we find in these works is a marriage between, on the one hand, hallucinatory, surreal, or nightmare imagery and, on the other, more traditional storytelling values. They further share a preference for subjective protagonists who narrate in the first person. If Surrealism is indeed an influence here, then it's a species of Surrealism that spurns the collective and avant-garde aim of liberating the unconscious and revolutionizing reality, returning instead to the Romantic fascination with stories written from or about the depths of the individual self. Taken together, these narratives constitute a Romantically surreal fantastique, rather as though Poe or Hoffmann had been writing there tales in the era of Surrealism.

Frustratingly, I can find no evidence elsewhere that Ray's book "Aux lisières des ombres" actually exists. If anyone finds it, please comment below.

[emmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

“and there isn’t a single sigh of the earth that doesn’t sigh in me too”

each story is captivating and unfamiliar, fueled by a dream-like complacency to the the surreal. truly a delight!

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere along a dreary journey, a traveler disembarks for a reason s/he doesn't fully understand. That's how most of the stories in this collection begin and, relying on dense, minute description, takes the reader wandering through a phantasmagoric dreamscape. Written in France in 1942, the stories seem to reflect an anonymous, but personal internalization of a directionless, deeply unsettling world unmoored from its foundations.

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent night themed stories.

"All of a sudden, the night was filled with its the cautious, treacherous cruelty."

"The landscape had the melancholy of unfinished things."

"It was a stormy night, you see, and his story had left my nerves somewhat frayed."

[Dylan Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing collection of weird tales that border on ghost stories but are wholly unique. Like a cross Jean Ray via Oscar Wilde or M.R James via J.k Huysmans

[mikhail · Rating 5 out of 5]

A set of deeply compelling and unnerving stories….coming from the surreal response to the abject reality of a modernity capable and hell-bent on its own all-to-clever-tangled-love-affair-with-utter-annihilation. Within these allegorical analyses of decay and destruction and transience and history lies some real affective power. We are surrounded by specters of our own confused inheritance. These stories are better contextualized within the World Wars, where lines blurred as we came to grips with the terrifying possibility, beyond the individual level, of the potentiality of madness and suicide. But even reading these stories now, keeping my own insomnia company in the belly of Manhattan, I was able to appreciate a dialogue with Brion. He asks us to confront fear and death…neither as slaves or juggernauts, but as mortals searching for a way to face the stories we tell ourselves. I really think about what I’m running from and chasing after in the labyrinths of mind and matter.

[Pieter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Waystations of the Deep Night ~ ★★★★
The Field Marshal of Fear ~ ★★★★
The Fire Sonata ~ ★★★
Incident on a Journey ~ ★★★★
Dead Waters ~ ★★★
La Capitana ~ ★★★★
The Glass Organ ~ ★★★
The Lost Street ~ ★★★★

[Quiver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too delicious to read all at once. I stretched out the stories one-a-day. What a wonderful series of dreams!

[Damian Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars for ‘Waystations of the Deep Night’, ‘The Field Marshal of Fear’, ‘Incident on a Journey’, ‘Dead Waters’, and ‘The Lost Street’.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you love ethereal mood creation and don't care much for story or character then this is the one for you.