Paris, 1915. A woman is hacked to death in her château. A prince is robbed of his jewels. A lord is found stuffed inside a trunk. All signs point to one name: Fantômas. This is the novel that launched a thirty-two volume phenomenon, the book that kept French readers gasping for breath and turning pages through the night. Fantômas is not a criminal. He is a shadow. A master of disguise who appears and disappears without trace, who seems to be everywhere and nowhere, who commits atrocities with the calm precision of a surgeon and the anonymity of a ghost. Inspector Juve, obsessed and brilliant, pursues him through speeding trains and dark alleys and the glittering salons of the Parisian elite, certain that this specter of chaos is real, that behind the rumors and myths there is a man. But the question that haunts every character in this book is the same question that haunted early twentieth-century France: what happens when crime becomes invisible, when evil wears a thousand faces? Souvestre wrote with the propulsive energy of serialized fiction at its peak, each chapter delivering shock after shock, each episode melting into the next with nauseating momentum. The New York Times called it an 'intoxicant.' They weren't wrong.
