This anthology, its editor informs us loftily in the first paragraph of his introduction, will not follow the well-trodden path along which recent collections on a similar subject have ambled, amiably but - it is implied - somewhat lazily. Imagine the effect of this on a reader who not only had no idea that anthologies of French horror were so plentiful, but might even have enjoyed the vampire stories by Theophile Gautier and Guy de Maupassant which Hale dismisses so contemptuously? Scary. But for those who know their frenetique from their fan tastique, there's plenty of deliciously morbid stuff here, from Euene Sue's Candide-like satire A True Account of the Travels of Claude Belissan, Clerk to the Public Prosecutor to Catulle Mendes's sexually overheated The Penitent and the Marquis de Sade's surprisingly chaste Dorci, or the Vagaries of Chance, one of nineteen stories which are being published in English for the first time.
Arminta Wallace