The House of Oracles

A master of the fleeting, fantastic, erotic short story, Thomas Owen (the pseudonym of Gerald Bertot), was one of a small group of Belgian writers and artists of considerable importance to the European Symbolist movement. Born in 1910, by the age of seventeen Owen had made himself known to Jean Ray, a founding father of the emerging Belgian ecole de l'etrange, in the tradition of Georges Rodenbach and Maurice Maeterlinck. Owen and Ray remained close friends and literary collaborators until Ray's death in 1964. First writing detective fiction, Owen switched to the fantastic in 1942 with l'Initiation a la Peur, after which, in the 1960s and 70s, came the collections of short stories excerpted in this selection."