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 Echo 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.