Stigma and the Pompeiian Fresco

Presented here for the first time in English, in translations by Brian Stableford, the current volume contains two novels of the occult by Gilbert-Augustin Thierry (1843-1915), which were originally published in serial form in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The first, Stigma (1888), the author's masterpiece, is a horror story on two levels, not merely in terms of the relentless suffering inflicted on the characters, but also in the subtler sense in which it gradually undermines the identification that the reader initially assumes, automatically, with the narrator-a sympathy that is gradually and clinically drained away to the extent that he too, like every other character in the story, is stigmatized as a victim of universal human corruption, an existential condition in which the "help" rendered by a quasi-Jansenist God is as horrifically ironic as that rendered by his deluded minions. A similar track is followed in the second novel, The Pompeiian Fresco to a scathing coda-which, juxtaposed and coupled with the melodramatic climax-raises the question of how, in the hands of an honest writer, stories can and ought to end, once Amour and Faith have both been discounted as realistic possibilities of happiness.