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There is no other reality than things invented by an inimitable imagination. Everything else is foolishness or error. . . . If Rachilde is the only one to be frightened by mirrors, to contemplate in the glory of the sunset or the hermetic castle where she will never enter, to experience the pangs of death for a pulled tooth, it is because she sees further than we. The master of the absurd has entered our bodies, according to Jesus' permission, and our sight has become obscured. If Rachilde's tales seem absurd to the demon named "Legion," we can be sure that they contain an invaluable part of the truth. Thus wrote Marcel Schwob in his introduction to Rachilde's classic collection of Decadent stories, The Demon of the Absurd, first published in 1894 and here presented for the first time in English, in a translation by Shawn Garrett. These tales and pièces de théâtre, uniting tragedy and comedy, horror and deep mystery, in their sum total, represent a major work by the Queen of Decadence.

The Viridian Book of Occult Fiction, the fifth volume of the books of occult fiction of many colors, brings together twenty-two tales, dating from 1824-1917, from the American occult revival. Tracing the history of the occult fiction of the United States from its beginnings, with writers such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe, the book marches forth through the mystical texts of occultists like Paschal Beverly Randolph, Freeman B. Dowd, and Belle M. Wagner, the scribe of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, into the first part of the twentieth century, where Blanche Cromartie and Max Heindel, of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, spin their astrological magic. Containing a diverse and splendid assortment of stories, about mysterious initiations and magnetism, hierophants and soul-transfers, The Viridian Book of Occult Fiction, edited by Brendan Connell, who also supplies a fine, erudite introduction, is an indispensable addition to any library of the supernatural and occult.

Edith Olivier (1872-1948), though chiefly remembered for her fantasy masterpiece The Love Child (1927), was also the author of a number of other works, including three horror stories, written in 1934-1935, which are gathered together here for the first time. These fine British tales of terror, uneasy, ghastly, and sometimes even gruesome, mark Olivier, despite her limited output, as one of the genre's unsung adepts.

"Cthulhu has many instruments, but all of them are possessed of free will, and magnetic power can only operate mysteriously, even on the most primitive and stubborn brains." Written to complete and conclude a series of metaphysical fantasies featuring Auguste Dupin, a character invented by Edgar Poe, which involve him with characters and entities invented by H. P. Lovecraft, as well as actual historical figures and occasional devices appropriated from other works of weird fiction, The Cthulhu Palimpsest, A Romance of Termination is a must-have, both for fans of the series and for fans of Brian Stableford, who produced this long-projected final volume with the pen of a master story-teller.

Prokop is a scientist who has a passion for the chemistry of explosives; this passion flowers in the discovery of Krakatit, a new explosive infinitely more powerful than any previously known, an explosive capable of wrecking the world; the small box of Krakatit is stolen; Prokop, in a panic of fear lest his terrible discovery do irreparable harm to humankind, begins frantically to chase what faint clues he has."Krakatit is a book to own and not to borrow."-The Central European Observer"The book is an adventure story, a fantastic mystery tale; but fundamentally it is a tour de force, the literary representation of the idea of explosion."-Time"The story rushes on tearing wheels like a high power car."-The Virginia Quarterly"This is a highly explosive book and must be handled with the utmost care."-The Slavonic Review"¿apek's dramatic instinct is unerring; he extracts from ­every situation an essence of terror, pity, or comedy that gives ­emotional significance to the smallest episode."-Times Literary Supplement

In 1831 Charles Nodier began to publish a series of "Extraits des mémoires de Maxime Odin" in the Revue de Paris. Although "Odin" is an anagram of the first four letters of Nodier, the relationship between the author and "Maxime Odin" is far more complicated than a simple transfiguration, and although all the stories in the present collection are entirely fictitious, the intensity of the author's imaginative involvement with them should not be underestimated. The Memoirs of Maxime Odin, presented here for the first time in English, in a magnificent translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the great works of French romanticism-exquisite, entertaining and touching, this is a masterpiece, the arrival of which has been long overdue in the English speaking world.

Rachilde was the pseudonym employed by Marguerite Eymery (1860-1953). Though remembered today primarily for her novels, which include the Decadent masterpiece Monsieur Vénus, she was also an exceptional writer of short fiction. The current volume, adeptly translated by Sue Boswell, brings together six of her short stories, none of which have previously appeared in English. This array of strange, Symbolist tales, sometimes brutal, always bizarre, strikes with a deep psychological power and deft artistry. The work of a true genius, The Blood-Guzzler and Other Stories is an important addition to the writings of the Queen of Decadence available in English.

Lionel Johnson, Decadent poet and critic, was one of the leading voices of the British 1890s. When he died suddenly at the age of 35, his old school friend Frank Russell-brother to Bertrand Russell and by then a radical member of the House of Lords-published a series of Johnson's early letters as Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson (1919). Carefully edited and anonymized, Russell claimed that these letters showed 'the true Lionel', rather than the 'later genius', to be a 'loving, suffering man, burning with zeal to help and comfort his fellow-sufferers in the world'. But why were the correspondents anonymized? What was missing from those edited sections? Were there aspects of the friendship Russell wished to conceal?This new edition, edited by historian Ruth Derham and scholar Sarah Green, restores for the first time the full text of Johnson's Winchester Letters from the recently discovered originals. Instead of pronouncements from a young prophet, these letters reveal something altogether more human, as four young men navigate some of the biggest questions of their day. Was religion still possible or desirable? Did sin still exist? And when did love of one's friends become something more?

Though principally remembered today as the founder of the Grand Guignol, the famous theater of horror, Oscar Méténier (1859-1913) was also a prolific writer of fiction. The current book, the first to be offered in English, brings together three of Méténier's pieces, translated by Daniel Corrick, including Decadence, which was first published in 1886 and was dedicated to Rachilde.

One of the best in the Dutch literary canon. A Peasant Farmer's Psalm is one of Felix Timmermans' most renowned novels. In it, a farmer recounts the story of his life: his connection to the soil which he works, his relationship with God (and pastor), and his natural acceptance of his and his family's fate. The story, written in the first person, echoes with this simple man's love for life. "Timmermans' language breathes soil, air and light, and his surprising sensory metaphors are tiny electric shocks that keep the reader on their toes. They create laughter and wonder and occasionally make your head spin. And sometimes they're so beautiful, I play a game with myself and try to smuggle them into conversations. (...) The vitality of A Peasant Farmer's Psalm comes to us from an unspoiled, lost Flanders. That's partly why, in this day and age, Timmermans' sentences feel like a medicine that provides a detox for our hectic lives-just keep taking it all in, bit by bit, until the novel is finished. He generously gives us some much-needed grounding." -Bart Van Loo, author of The Burgundians

"For years I have been haunted by the idea that I should orchestrate those inner voices which sometimes speak to us in unison, and so compose a novel, not so much with the people about us, as with those within ourselves, for have we not several selves and cannot a story arise from their conflicts and harmonies?"Thus wrote Natalie Clifford Barney in her author's note to The One Who Is Legion, a novel which she published privately in London in 1930 in an edition of only 560 copies. The book, which received scant notice at the time of its publication and has since been all but forgotten, is at once an occult work of genius and an early example of androgynous literature. Here brought forth in a new edition that should secure its place as one of the great classics of modernism, this highly experimental tour de force, in which Barney reinterprets the stream of consciousness techniques James Joyce had used in Ulysses in her own highly original style, is a strange story of possession and fourth-dimensional materialism-and is, in fact, a glorious labyrinth of visions and emotions.

Robert Scheffer (1863-1926) was one of the most interesting exponents of Decadent and Symbolist fiction. In the present book, The Green Fly, a tale of acute ­horror, is ­subsidized by three other pieces, the ­selection making more of the great author's work available to an English speaking audience.

Paul Margueritte (1860-1918), though principally remembered today as a writer of Naturalist fiction and for his scandalous novel Tous quatre (1885), did, during a period when he was writing for the Écho newspaper, have a brief experimental phase during which he produced a series of proto-surrealist tales, as well as dabbling in weird and supernatural fiction.The items in the present volume, all of which are translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, include the most distinctive of his narrative experiments, in which he attempted to adapt the substance of his early pantomimes to the format of short fiction. These pieces, which revel in their own idiosyncrasy even when sometimes pretending to a strict naturalism and a conventional sentimentality, are also capable of a casual brutality uncommon even in the cynical medium of the conte cruel. The stories assembled in this slim collection fully deserve rescue from their obscure origins, and they benefit from being gathered together into a curious set. They remain intriguingly pointed, more than a century after their composition.

Rachilde, the writer whose formal name was Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1853), is primarily remembered today for her sensational decadent novel Monsieur Vénus (1884), which was prosecuted as pornography in Belgium, where it was initially published, resulting in a conviction and a sentence of two years' imprisonment imposed in absentia. She was, however, the author of numerous other works which, though less well-known, are of equal and sometimes even greater excellence. One of the best and most striking of these is The Princess of Darkness (1895), here presented for the first time in English, in a superb translation by Brian Stableford. The novel, unquestionably one of the most daring works to come out of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, was written under Rachilde's other pseudonym, Jean de Chilra, and is at once a profound psychological study and a neo-Gothic masterpiece, featuring a haunted house and a family curse and other much more unusual motifs that are calculated to alienate readers as well as to challenge them, in a frightening treasure that any connoisseur of perversity is bound to savor and to think precious.

Phantasy and Other Poems, originally published in 1930 by the Vine Press, was occult writer Ethel Archer's second and final collection of poetry, following her earlier classic The Whirlpool (1911). The present publication offers the first complete reprint of the book since it first appeared.

The vampire is the most glamorous and iconic of Gothic figures. In Night's Black Agents, editor Daniel Corrick assembles a baker's dozen of tales that trace the sanguinary path of this thirsty, mythical creature from the early nineteenth century, where it acted as an incarnation of fears of libertinism and diabolism, appearing as the Satanic villain in penny dreadfuls, through to the early twentieth century, where it appeared as both femme fatale and homoerotic bloodsucker. This volume of stories, often perverse and even more often cruel, includes pieces by authors both famous and unknown, such as Alexander Dumas, Thomas Pecket Prest, Leonhard Stein, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and features a number of rare, never anthologized items, thus showcasing in lusts for blood and doomed devouring loves, the infernal miracle that is the vampire.

Jean Lorrain, later famous as the author of such Decadent masterpieces as Nightmares of an Ether Drinker and Errant Vice, began his literary career in 1882 with the book of poems titled The Blood of the Gods-sending a sophisticated shudder through the cafés of Montmartre.In this volume, presented here for the first time in English, in a translation by Jacob Rabinowitz, Lorrain, the self-proclaimed "ambassador from Sodom," gives exquisite expression to Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite themes, expanding them, with defiant pride, to include unambiguous accounts of male homosexuality. Only now, more than a century later, can we fully appreciate the courage and the suffering behind his brilliant and sardonic self-expression.

In 1892 Jules Lermina (1839-1915) published a collection of short fiction titled La Magicienne, with the specialist occult publisher Chamuel. The current volume brings together the bulk of the material in that book, subsidized by additional items-two short occult fantasies and a humorous novelette. For most of the twentieth century Lermina's works were the almost-exclusive province of collectors of rare books, a situation which the present volume helps to remedy, including as it does a substantial serving of the cream, with such pieces as "The Magicienne" and "The Spell-Caster," which are both masterpieces of occult fiction, and the title story, "Human Life," which is a work of genius that falls outside of all genre categorization.

From April 1897 until April 1903, Jane de La Vaudère (1857-1908) published in the Parisian newspapers La Presse and La Lanterne a series of over one hundred vignettes, mostly under the heading Contes Rapides. These brief stories, of beauty, horror, humor, love, and cruelty, carry strategies of narrative minimalism to a new level, and show the work of a masterful female author who was able to polish gems of decadence to sparkling perfection in the highly misogynistic environment of fin-de-siècle journalism dominated by her male counterparts. This collection, assembled and translated into English by Brian Stableford, offers the first opportunity that anyone has ever had to read the series of rapid tales as a series and to asses it as a collage; as a bird's eye view of contemporary Parisian society it is highly selective and idiosyncratic, but that only serves to make it more interesting, and as a pioneering adventure in narrative minimalization it offers a significant exemplar to modern writers' workshops.

Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) was one of the most notable Pre-Raphaelite artists, remembered for his lush literary paintings and Orientalist masterpieces-and remembered, as well, for the tragic conviction he received for sodomy after he was arrested in 1873, an event which ended his ability to display his work publicly. What is less known, however, is that, aside from being a fine artist, he was also a writer of great ability. The current volume, edited and curated by Daniel Corrick, collects all of Solomon's known writings. From his extended prose poems "A Mystery of Love in Sleep" and "A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep," to his exceedingly rare "Two Treatises on Scientific Subjects," the pieces herein will shed a new light on one of the periods most interesting and talented artists, showing a mind of great delicacy of thought, as well as often humorous instincts. Included also in this volume is the play "Cleopatra's Needle," only one original copy of which is known to exist, as well as his correspondence with Algernon Charles Swinburne, and reviews of his writing by J. A. Symonds and Swinburne.

Armand Charpentier (1864-1949), though all but forgotten today, was one of a number of journalists who, around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, contributed Decadent and Naturalist fiction to the French press. The present volume brings together four pieces of such fiction, all translated into English for the first time by Shawn Garrett. From the psychological horror story "Claustrophobic Madness" to the humorous "The Adventure de Jacques Pétromé," this offering, which sheds new light on a forgotten fin-de-siècle personality, is an important addition to all libraries of Decadence and French literature.

Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926), though he is primarily remembered today as an art critic and an early champion of the Impressionists, was also an extremely original writer of fiction, especially in the Decadent style. The current volume brings together sixteen of his highly refined stories, published from October 1892 to December 1900 in various Parisian newspapers, many having never before appeared in book form. These tales, ably translated into English by Shawn Garrett, which feature pimps and prowlers, obsessed artists, aesthetes and thieves, bizarre lovers and curious characters, might be seen as a series of brightly-woven tapestries of fin-de-siècle France, and, though often disturbing, also bring with them the power and charm of a great writer whose work certainly deserves to be better known. About the Author: Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926) was a French man of letters primarily remembered today as an art critic and an early champion of the Impressionists, though he also wrote a significant amount of fiction. He contributed regularly to various newspapers, including "Gil Blas", "Le Journal", and "La Justice". In 1908 he became director of the Manufacture des Gobelins tapestry factory. Among his art related writing are Le Statuaire Rodin (1889) and Claude Monet (1920). His works of fiction include L'Apprentie (1904) and Hermine Gilquin (1907).

"Klabund" was the pseudonym employed by Alfred Henschke (1890-1928), who wrote, from January to April 1921, "during the fever of an illness," the novel Spook, which is here presented for the first time in ­English, in a translation by Jonah Lubin. This hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state can be seen as both a late entry into the Decadent pantheon and a striking example of Expressionist fiction. A haunting and harrowing tale, which seems to have been composed at least in part under the effects of morphine, Spook is, in its own troubled way, a glorious book, and a gorgeous poem of madness.

The Turkish Lady, written in 1898, a semi-fictional travel piece by Jean Lorrain, is here presented in accompaniment with two other items of his: The Last Days of Venice, which is another travel piece, and a decadent fairy tale titled The Princess of the Geese.

Anna Jane Vardill (1781-1852), though primarily known in her lifetime as a poet, was actually the author of a significant amount of prose, using the signature "V." One of the most interesting of these ventures is a serial she published from January 1821 to June 1821 in The European Magazine titled The Secrets of ­Cabalism. This series of six short stories, which the current volume brings together in book form for the first time, contains some of the earliest occult fiction written by a woman in the English language. The brilliance and originality of these tales of alchemy and philosophy, adventure and natural magic, can be attested to by the fact that several of them have been reproduced and reprinted in various places, often uncredited or misattributed, the most noteworthy example of this being by the famous editor Peter Haining, who through six editions attributed one of the stories herein to William Child Green.

The fifty-eight extraordinary pieces which make up Spells, though brief, most being just a page or two in length, are grandiose in their ambition. These miniatures, which are bathed in the light of violet suns and wrapped in the beams of the old moons, take up the themes of strange magics and poisons, curious births and lost theologies, and are like extracts of abbreviated drama, the sum-total of which might or might not be a visionary guide.