From “The Top Fifty Books in the Fantastic/Gothic Genre”, The Goth, December 1990
This article is 99% certain to have been written by Laurent Lalonde, with whom Jennie Gray had worked at the Folio Society in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the requisite correspondence which would corroborate authorship is missing.
IT IS THE WONDER OF OTHER NATIONS that France has a magazine about books, Lire, which sells 150,000 copies every month. One of Lire‘s most popular features has been its lists of the top 50 books in any one genre or national literature. Recently, The Goth commissioned Robert de la Bedoyere, black sheep half-brother of Edward de la Bedoyere, to look at Lire’s top fifty books in the fantastic/Gothic genre and to give us his very personal comments on his favourites.
Lire’s Top Ten
- William Beckford – Vathek (1786)
- Adolfo Bioy Casares – La Invención de Morel (1940 – ‘The Invention of Morel’)
- Jorge Luis Borges – El Aleph (1949 – ‘The Aleph’)
- ETA Hoffman – Contes (1776-1822 – ‘Tales’)
- Gérard de Nerval – Aurélia (1855)
- Charles Perrault – Contes (1697 – ‘Tales’)
- Edgar Allan Poe – Tales (1845)
- Jan Potocki – Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (1804 – ‘Manuscript found at Saragosse’)
- William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)
- Anon – A Thousand and One Nights (8th to 16th century)
Robert’s personal choice from Lire’s Top Ten
Gérard de Nerval – Aurélia
At the age of seven Gérald Labrunie fell for Sophie Dawes, the English mistress of the Duke of Burgundy, and his life was set. He became an aristocrat by calling himself Gérard de Nerval. He developed a penchant for eating ice cream out of skulls. He paraded around the gardens of the Palais Royal with a lobster on a blue ribbon because ‘it doesn’t bark’. Most of all, he fell madly in love with the actress Jennie Colon, an incarnation of that ultimate symbol of nightmarish English enchantment: the Jennie figure. After that, it was mental breakdowns, spells in asylums, and finally hanging himself with what he had claimed was the Queen of Sheba’s garter. In his pockets were the last pages of Aurélia.
Link to Gustave Doré’s extraordinary picture of Gérard de Nerval’s suicide.
Robert’s personal choice from Lire‘s Next Fifteen
Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de Chagrin (English title usually ‘The Wild Ass’s Skin’)
Balzac’s main contribution to literature is his invention of the Older Woman. As a result, he received many letters of gratitude and praise from spinsters and unhappy wives throughout Europe, thus assuring an endless supply of eager and available ‘femmes d’un certain age’ for the fat, ugly, greasy Balzac. One of these was the Contessa Visconti Guidoboni, born plain Sarah Lowell. She showed her love for Balzac by hiding him from his creditors in her home on the Champs-Élysées. The affair ended when one of these creditors, discovering his whereabouts, began suing her husband, the Count, for Balzac’s debts. La Peau de Chagrin is about a magical piece of wild ass’s hide which shrinks with every wish that’s been granted, along with the owner’s lifespan. The sexual symbolism was not lost on Balzac’s bevy of admirers.
Robert’s Personal Choice – Guy de Maupassant, La Horla
A man awakens to find someone or something crouching over him, its mouth on his, sucking his breath away. Maupassant invented the word ‘horla’ for this terrifying apparition and would only say that the word had just come to him and that it didn’t mean anything. Some critics have detected the similarity between ‘horla’ and ‘Zola’ (Naturalism sucking the life out of the essentially Romantic Maupassant?). The thought of Zola’s mouth on one is indeed terrifying. But surely the likeliest meaning of the word ‘horla’ is ‘la whore [est] la’.
Robert’s personal choice from the Last Twenty-Five
Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des Supplices (The Torture Garden)
A Chinese torture garden. A naked man’s back blocks the only exit of a narrow tube; the man is shackled and cannot move; inside the tube is a fat, hungry rat; from the other end of the tube, a red-hot rod moves ever closer to the now terrified rat, who looks frantically for an exit, ready to claw his way out with demonic zeal . . . One of the few works which can genuinely be called a novel of ideas.
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, L’Ève Future (The Future Eve)
The Fin-de-Siecle (which, of course, is also the Fin-du-Romantisme, ‘Splendour’s Last Decay’), produced no more characteristic figure than Villiers. His father, the Marquis, ruined an already diminished family fortune by looking for buried treasure. The destitute Villiers had thus to find a rich young wife. He went, obviously, to England. He found just the person in Anna Eyre. The courtship went well, until one night at the opera, Villiers wouldn’t stop talking about Hegel and Anna wanted to listen to Mozart. She said no to his proposal. Later he would tum the table on her by creating Miss Alicia Clary in L’Ève Future, the modern seductive but mediocre woman whom Lord Ewald forsakes. Thomas Edison builds Ewald an android called Hadaly who has Alicia Clary’s (and Anna Eyre’s) pretty features, and the android, unlike real women, can converse as well! Meanwhile Villiers became more and more destitute, and the man whose best-known line is ‘Living? We’ll leave that to the servants’, ended up marrying his servant.
H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
In this story of a man trapped on an island amidst the ghastly, mindless creatures of a mad scientist, Wells finally found the perfect objective correlative to the absolute horror he had regularly experienced as a child: spending Saturday afternoons in Chislehurst watching his father play cricket.
FOOTNOTE
During the course of his reading Robert came across the answer to the problem which has been troubling literary man for the entire twentieth century, viz: how to tell Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche apart.
Robert remarks that this is now easy if you just remember that one was born in ’56 and died in 1900 at the age of 44, whilst the other was born in ’44 and died in 1900 at the age of 56. Problem solved.
N.B. Most regrettably, the pedantic checking of facts in 2026 has revealed that Oscar was actually born in 1954 and died in 1900 at the age of 46. Nonetheless, in its time the above thesis made a considerable contribution towards Friedrich/Oscar Dichotomy scholarship.
Friedrich, considerably overweighted by his moustache
Oscar, considerably overweighted by his fur coat
FINAL THOUGHT: The fact that both men died in 1900 is a most strange thing as Friedrich so clearly belonged to the nineteenth century and Oscar to the twentieth.
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