Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker

None of Jean Lorrain’s biographers has contrived to discover exactly when or why he began taking ether, or how much of it he took before realising (too late) that it was an extremely bad idea. The drug certainly helped provide the feverish, nightmarish atmosphere of these wonderfully decadent and sophisticated tales, and many of the apparitions with which they are populated. Brian Stableford’s superb translations represent the first appearance in English of Jean Lorrain’s ether-inspired ‘nightmares’, originally collected as Sensations et Souvenirs in 1895. The later tales also translated here for the first time are in the tradition of the contes cruel, and in them the influence of ether-drinking is still very much apparent. In his authoritative introduction Brian Stableford presents Lorrain as one of the select band of literary figures "whose life and art were bound together into the most seamless whole. He was the man who embodied, more intimately and more inescapably than any other, the absurdities, affectations, paradoxes and perversities of the Decdent style and the Decadent world-view." The cover shows a colourised photograph of the actor Édouard de Max in the play Prométhée by Jean Lorrain, 1900. CONTENTS Introduction by Brian Stableford EARLY STORIES 1. The Egregore 2. Funeral Oration 3. The Locked Room 4. Magic Lantern 5. The Glass of Blood 6. Beyond 7. Glaucous Eyes SENSATIONS 8. One of Them 9. An Undesirable Residence 10. A Troubled Night 11. A Posthumous Protest 12. An Uncanny Crime 13. The Holes in the Mask 14. The Visionary 15. The Possessed 16. The Double SOUVENIRS 17. The Toad 18. Night-Watch 19. The Spirit of the Ruins RÉCITS 20. Dolmance 21. One January Night 22. The Spectral Hand 23. Prey to Darkness CONTES 24. The Princess of the Red Lilies 25. The Princess at the Sabbat 26. Narkiss 27. The Princess aux Miroirs Notes * First published in 2002 by Tartarus Press