Tales of Mystery and Horror

Maurice Level wrote the kind of horror that doesn't just scare you, it unmakes you. In these 26 tales, the French master of the macabre strips his characters down to their rawest selves: desperate lovers, grieving parents, men driven to madness by guilt or obsession. Level was adored by H.P. Lovecraft for good reason. His stories operate in the tradition of the Grand Guignol, visceral, violent, designed to shock, but beneath the grotesque plotting lies something startlingly human. These are not merely shock vehicles. They are dissections of what remains when civilization's thin veneer is peeled away. A man discovers his wife's secret just before his own death. A father makes an unthinkable bargain to save his son. Each tale builds toward a twist, but the true horror lies in what Level reveals about the human heart in its most desperate hours. This collection introduces English readers to work that has been hidden in French for nearly a century, stories that prove terror and tenderness were never opposites.