05/31/2005
The opportunities for the genre enthusiasts to read in English some French weird
fiction from the last century, let alone to read it in a good translation, have
been few and far between. Until recently, that is, when Jean-Marc Loffcier's
Blackcoat Press has started its commendable enterprise of making such texts
available.The present volume collects some of the literary production of
Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe August, Comte de Villers de "lisle-Adam (1836-1889),
pioneer of the Symbolist Movement and author of various novels of so-called
proto-science fiction (Axel, Levee Future).
The book is translated and adapted by Brian Stableford, who also provides a very
exhaustive introduction and a lot of interesting notes to the text, and the
volume is beautifully produced in an attractive trade paperback format.
The main course is constituted of the title novella "The Vampire Soul," where we meet for the first time the author's disreputable alter ego, Dr. Tribulat Bonhomet, who acts as the narrator of the novella's events. Unfortunately, the remaining ten short stories are, as Stableford himself admits, "rather trivial" and contain no elements of horrific or supernatural nature.
In "The Vampire Soul," after a rather boring first chapter where Villiers introduces Bonhomet's character, digressing at length about his nose as well as his partiality to Voltaire and Machiavelli (a chapter that I strongly advise to skip altogether), we come at last to the story. Bonhomet, while travelling aboard a British ship to pay aa visit to a married couple of friends, makes the acquaintance of a Lt. Clifton. The man, although rather obliquely, confesseses his love for a married woman whose description fits the spouse of the very friend Bonhomet is going to visit, a Mme. Lenoir, a woman who is sadly affected by a progressive impairment of her sight. After reaching his friends house, Bonhomet soon becomes engaged in a series of excruciatingly dull conversations with the husband. The pseudo-philosophical hodgepodge is enough to tempt you to quit reading and devote yourself to less soporific matters. But if you endure the torture, then the plot goes on. Possibly due to his immoderate self-indulgence in snuff, Dr. Lenoir is struck dead by apoplexy. One year later, after her lover has been savagely murdered during a mission at sea, Mme. Lenoir, now incredibly and suddenly aged, turned into an old woman whose face is "yellow and drawn like parchment," She reveals to Bonhomet that she is that she is haunted by her late husband's spirit, seeking revenge for her adultery. Shortly after, she dies.
I won't spoil one of the few actual shivers the novella provides to the reader by disclosing what the learned Bonhomet will be able to detect in the dead woman's eyes. To horror movie fans, it will suffice to mention that a similar ingenuous trick constitutes the cornerstone of the famous (and nowadays, alas, extremely hard to find) Dario Argento's film Four Flies on Grey Velvet. To the modern reader Villiers will appear as a bizarre writer, endowed with a narrative style redundant and convoluted. An editor of current fiction would definitely cut off a good portion of the five central chapters, much to the reader's advantage. Once cleaned up of its philosophical crap and learned quotations, the story still works. And, although in our cynical times adultery could be hardly suggested as a likely reason for a terrible revenge from beyond the grave, the novella's last chapters are a standing example of ghastly supernatural horror.