Nate D's Reviews > The King in the Golden Mask

While as stories these often feel ever so slight, barely more than historical sketches of lost times, peoples, and events in classical or medieval history, Schwob was a master at reworking found tales and settings into incandescent imagery that push these into the hallucinatory and ineffaceable. A clear influence on Borges, even the simplest of these look onwards towards his early pseudo-biographies in A Universal History of Iniquity, while the more elaborate become tightly-arranged symbolist tableaux that point forward to B.'s even greater conceptual refinements (or his countrymen Paul Willem's ethereal architectures in The Cathedral of Mist). And lastly, a certain taste for tales of horror and the weird, much in fashion in the fin-de-siecle milieu, grants these a desire to startle, making even sketches surprisingly punchy. So, despite apparent slightness, these are rich and involving. Masks, lost cities, apocalypses (my favorite: "The Terrestrial Fire"), and dreamscapes.