Nate D's Reviews > Spells

These stories of automatons, devils, and virulent gardens are well-steeped in the floridly decomposing language and paranoia of the decadent-weird tradition, but having been penned in the immediate shadow of WWII, they seem oddly dated and out of time. And without the invention (and genuine weirdness) of someone like Robert Aickman. Instead these are stories of obsession and malaise, obsessively caught up in describing some fateful place or encounter, that seem oddly incapable of pushing through their concepts into real shock or horror. What remains is tonally suggestive and bordering on the sublime anticipatory at points, but ultimately oddly unimaginative and stunted.

And that same historical shadow that makes them feel especially dated also falls directly on Ghelderode, who seems to have welcomed fascism into Belgium. At last, with the final stories, one completed only later than the original version of this volume, and one omitted from later printings once the tides of history turned, he fully spills over into misogyny and then anti-semitism. As the translator is careful to note, there's a value in staring down the darkest impulses of the 20th-century, for here we have an erudite monster whose kind we must be able to spot in the future. But having weathered this volume, I'm released, relieved to consign Ghelderode to the historical grave that he so clearly dug for himself.