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While this review refers to the recent (Feb. 14, 2002) French edition, an English edition of this title also exists.

If in English, dark fantasy is frequently marginalized by those who discuss "serious literature," the case is even worse in French, where the snobbery of the literary elite isn't about to allow them to admit that works of imaginary fiction are more than just cheap popular fiction. Nonetheless, Le roi au masque d'or is perhaps the greatest collection of early French dark fantasy. Published in France in 1892, when a young American artist, Robert W. Chambers, who would in 1895 publish the classic horror collection The King in Yellow was at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Schwob's book while thematically different from Chambers', could well have been an influence on Chambers (though I've never seen this postulated). Descriptions like "the moon, like a yellow aerial mask" in the title story and the arrangement of somewhat off-genre tales at the end of the collection also suggest parallels with Chambers' work. The 21 short tales in Le roi au masque d'or are perhaps most akin, in terms of mood and their extensive vocabulary, to the best of Clark Ashton Smith's prose poem tales, with a smidgen of A. Merritt, and of course with a tinge of the conte cruel so popular in France in the late 19th century. Indeed, some stories are dedicated to such famous practitioners of the conte cruel as Octave Mirbeau (Le jardin des supplices), and Jean Lorrain (Contes d'un buveur d'ether).

The title story, supposedly loosely based Buddhist legend, is perhaps the darkest, one in which everyone in a gloomy castle is hiding behind masks: the doomed leper-king, his priests, his court fools and the women of the court. A nasty cruel twist completes the tale. The theme of masking/unmasking crops up in some of the best French horror works of the last century: Jean Lorrain's Histoires de masques (c. 1900) and André de Richaud's La nuit aveuglante (1966). "La peste," a tale of the black death in 14^th century Italy, has a wonderfully disgusting finale. Schwob's preoccupation with disease isn't all that surprising since he suffered from a chronic incurable intestinal disorder that eventually killed him. "La flute," a story worthy of William Hope Hodgson, tells of a meeting at sea with a single survivor in a lifeboat, and his damned and damning piping. "Les embaumeuses" a tale of seductive and deadly female embalmers is very similar to one of the stories [t. Winter Damon's "Blue Roses, Red Wine" (?)] in the recent collection The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique, stories set in Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique. Smith himself had a reading and writing knowledge of French* and would undoubtedly have appreciated Schwob's work. "La cité dormante," a tale of a lost, and ultimately fatal city, frozen in time, is also very reminiscent of Smith.

Schwob's stories also include tales of prehistoric times: (i) "La mort d'Odjigh," tells of a cave man's trek along with a lone wolf and some lesser beasts, to break the hold of the Ice Age on the lands of his people, (ii) "L'incendie terrestre" reverses the conditions to intense volcanic activity, postulating a population bottleneck in which only Adam and Eve survive. The last couple of decades of the 19th century were a time of intense interest in evolution and anthropology, spawning Schwob's stories and the numerous prehistoric tales J.H. Rosny (e.g., Quest for Fire), to whom "La mort d'Odjigh" was dedicated. Some other stories are more straightforward historical tales of murder, by or for a woman: "Blanche la Sanglante," "La charette," "Cruchette," "Les faulx-visaiges," "La Grande-Brière." "La machine a parler" tends more to science-fiction. A mad scientist has created an artificial talking machine, but when it attempts to declare its superiority to God, it tears and collapses.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.