The Best of 2025

Top ten reads of the year
‘Twas a great year for reading! I managed to crank out 120 reviews this year, and some of those books were long, difficult, but rewarding reads. In nonfiction, I’ve really been enjoying the books of Peter Watson, a British intellectual historian who writes about the history of ideas—in science, philosophy, the arts, sociology, economics, psychology and more. He’s a superb summarizer, a captivating storyteller, and I always come away from one of his books with a long list of books and subjects that I want to pursue further. In fiction, I have made three major discoveries in the past couple years, three great novelists whose books I’ve only begun to dive into: Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), Dutch author Louis Couperus (1863–1923), and German-Mexican author B. Traven (birth and death dates unknown). Their books ought to keep me busy for years. Listed below are my ten favorite books read this year (one “book” is actually a four-novel series), arranged chronologically by date of publication. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

 

The Cabin (La Barraca) by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1898)
Spanish author Blasco Ibáñez was not only respected in his native land but also enjoyed popularity and critical acclaim among English-language readers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With The Cabin, a.k.a. The Shack, he delivers a short but powerful novel in a naturalist style similar to Emile Zola’s fiction. In an insular farming community in Valencia, Spain, a conflict arises between the local community and a family of newcomers. Blasco Ibáñez renders with authenticity and pathos the tragic escalation of events.

The Small Souls series by Louis Couperus

Small Souls (1901)

The Later Life (1902)

The Twilight of the Souls (1902)

Dr. Adriaan (1903)
This four-novel saga by Dutch realist Couperus chronicles the lives and fortunes of the Van Lowes, an upper-class family living in The Hague. Their father, now deceased, was once the governor general of Java, Indonesia, and used to rub elbows with the king. His descendants, however, find themselves slipping down the ladder of status from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. This multi-generational story, with a large ensemble of characters, depicts realistic people facing life’s real problems. The reader can’t help but identify and get emotionally involved in the family’s affairs.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1916)

Here’s Blasco Ibáñez again with an epic novel written, published, and set during World War I. The story follows the lives and fortunes of a French-Argentine family. The first half takes place in Argentina, chronicling the family history in a style reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez. The second half, which takes place in Europe, is a gripping and often brutal exposé of the horrific realities of the First World War. This is a novel about the civilian experience of the war; for a novel of the military experience, see the next selection, below. 

Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse (1916)

Though not as well-known as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, this French novel, published a dozen years earlier, also presents a vivid and visceral depiction of the soldier’s experience of the war. The story follows a French squadron of foot soldiers, made up of working-class men with limited education. Based on some of his own experiences of the war, Barbusse presents an unglamorous, unheroic vision of war filled with blood, mud, and at times even mind-numbing drudgery. One of history’s great anti-war novels.

The Bridge in the Jungle by B. Traven (1928)

Traven is a German author who lived for some years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. In this case, an American drifter visits a friend in a small Central American village, where he happens upon a party thrown by the locals. The festivities are interrupted, however, by an unexpected human tragedy. Traven’s storytelling is a vivid immersion into the reality of life among the rural poor in a developing country. He is a leftist realist who depicts Latin America with authenticity, sensitivity, and empathy.

War with the Newts by Karel Capek (1936)

Mankind discovers an intelligent race of amphibians living under the sea, so naturally, what do we do? Exploit them! This dystopian sci-fi novel is an ingenious work of social commentary that satirizes imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, nationalism, the Nazis, American racism, slavery, British pompousness, the League of Nations, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, religion, and more. This is an ingenious work of satire filled with intelligent humor and ugly truths.

Hombre by Elmore Leonard (1961)

These days, Leonard is better known for his crime novels, but he got his start in westerns, a genre in which he is a modern master. Hombre is the story of John Russell, a mixed-race man who travels across Arizona in a stagecoach full of White passengers who look down on him for his background. When the coach encounters trouble, however, to whom do they turn to save their bacon? This riveting western was adapted into the 1967 film starring Paul Newman.

Blindness by José Saramago (1995)

In this apocalyptic sci-fi/horror novel from Portuguese Nobel laureate Saramago, humanity is hit with an epidemic of blindness. Because of the highly contagious nature of this malady, the stricken are herded into quarantine camps. This novel isn’t so much about blindness as it is about what happens to people when they are subjected to such extreme circumstances. Somewhat like a Holocaust novel, the story is an examination in how low humanity can be degraded while still remaining human. This is not a pleasure read, but it is gripping.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson (2006)

Peter Watson made it on my Top Ten list last year with his book The Modern Mind, an intellectual history of the 2oth century. His book Ideas is similar in approach but covers history from the dawn of mankind to the year 1900. This is a world history that’s not about wars or kings but rather about landmark ideas and developments in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and more. Watson demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, and archaeology, among other disciplines, making for an intellectually stimulating read.

Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith (2022)

Barry Windsor-Smith, with his highly detailed, quasi-pre-Raphaelite style, has long been one of my favorite comic book artists. With Monsters, he proves that he is also a writer to be reckoned with. This dark and disturbing graphic novel involves a young man coerced into participating in an experimental military program. The story includes some genetic manipulation, so it’s not entirely removed from the sci-fi and superhero genres, but this graphic masterpiece rises above genre fiction and deserves to be regarded with the finest of contemporary literary fiction. 

  

Old Books by Dead Guys has been posting these year-end lists since 2013. To see the top tens from years past, click on the “Best-of lists” tag and scroll through the results. Happy reading in 2026! 

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson

From Harlem to Hollywood, and vice versa

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema was published in 2024. The author is Odie Henderson, film critic for the Boston Globe, who I think is probably right around my age. While I, however, grew up watching Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood movies in a small town in Wisconsin, Henderson grew up watching Pam Grier and Fred Williamson movies in Jersey City and Times Square. Henderson brings to this history a nostalgic enthusiasm for the genre but also an extensive knowledge of the film industry. For each movie he discusses, Henderson provides a wealth of behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the picture and the careers of those involved in its production.

In the first chapter, Henderson provides an overview of Black American cinema, pre-Blaxploitation. The bulk of the book then covers the years 1970 to 1978. Henderson considers Cotton Comes to Harlem to be the birth of the Blaxploitation genre (when Hollywood realized they could make money off of Black films) and The Wiz to be the nail in its coffin. In between, he highlights every major Blaxploitation film, as well as some lesser-known obscurities. Along the way, a number of subgenres are examined, such as horror films, westerns, rom-coms, high school dramas, women in prison, and of course, gangster/crime movies, like those starring the aforementioned Grier and Williamson.

I’ve seen at least half of the films discussed here, and after reading this book, I’d like to see the rest. Henderson provides plot summaries of all the movies he covers in the book. His synopses include spoilers, and they do often give away the endings of the films. By the time you get to the end of this information-rich genre survey, however, it’s unlikely you’re going to remember the difference between the conclusions of Uptown Saturday Night versus Let’s Do It Again or Hammer versus Bucktown. There is so much film criticism, film history, and film trivia crammed into this book. Throughout, Henderson’s prose is a joy to read, delivering a wealth of information in an addictively fun narrative, with just enough period slang to keep things cool while maintaining film-critic dignity and avoiding overly ostentatious cleverness. He intersperses the film-talk with a few stories of his youth, how he grew up watching these movies, but this is definitely not a memoir. It’s closer to an encyclopedia of the genre, although arranged chronologically. Henderson also includes a few brief interviews with a movie producer and a couple of fellow film critics.

My interest in Blaxploitation films springs mainly from their soundtracks, an important aspect of any film in this genre. Artists like Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), and The Impressions (Three the Hard Way) created some of the best soul music of the ‘70s in their scores and soundtracks. Although this is primarily a film book, Henderson does cover the music that accompanies the films he discusses. Perhaps as much as fifteen percent of the text might be concerned with music. There’s an entire chapter on Black concert films, and a sidebar on “The Top Ten Best Blaxploitation Songs.”

As a fan of 1970s cinema, I really enjoyed Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras. The only way to make this book better would be to make it bigger by adding more lesser-known films. Henderson has certainly got the biggest and best movies of the era well-covered. Inspired by this fun and fascinating study of the genre, I’ll be hunting down many of these movies on streaming services and YouTube.

The Moon Pool by A. Merritt

Hackneyed lost-world lunacy

Abraham Merritt (1884–1943), who often published under the abbreviated name of A. Merritt, was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy fiction. For many years, he was also an editor for The American Weekly, a syndicated newspaper supplement. His sci-fi novel The Moon Pool was originally published as two short stories in the fiction magazine All-Story Weekly. Merritt then combined these stories into a novel, which was published in book form in 1919.

A brief forward to the novel explains that an anthropologist named Dr. Throckmartin has disappeared, along with his wife and two assistants, while on a research expedition. Suspicion has fallen on Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, a botanist, who saw Throckmartin shortly before he went missing. The narrative of this novel is Goodwin’s written account of what really happened. This report has been edited by A. Merritt and published by the fictional International Association of Science.

Throckmartin and Goodwin, former acquaintances, are both conducting research on different islands in the South Pacific. They meet each other on a passenger steamer traveling amongst the islands, headed for Melbourne, Australia. Throckmartin had been doing research at the archaeological site of Nan-Matal, the ruins of an ancient Micronesian civilization on the island of Ponape (Wikipedia spells the actual sites “Nan Madol” and “Pohnpei”). Throckmartin tells Goodwin a harrowing story of how his wife and the other members of his party vanished on the islands. He is traveling to Australia to gather more supplies and men for a return expedition. Not long after telling this story, Throckmartin himself vanishes from the boat on which the two scientists are traveling. Goodwin resolves to venture to the Nan-Matal to investigate the disappearances and rescue the Throckmartin party. In this effort, he is accompanied by a couple of new acquaintances, men with their own reasons for embarking on such an adventure. When they make it to the archaeological site, they discover a portal that leads to a lost civilization underground.

The Moon Pool is a horror novel for those who think colored lights are spooky. Over and over again, we get images of colored lights—“pulsing” (14 times), “throbbing” (17 times), “coruscating” (15 times)—in every color of the rainbow. Another oft-repeated motif is the characters experiencing simultaneous feelings of “ecstasy and terror”—many, many times and in many variations. The best portions of The Moon Pool are when Merritt offers scientific explanations of the mystic phenomena depicted—speculative hypotheses drawing from physics, chemistry, anthropology, etc.—but there is so little of that. The vast bulk of this book is just the familiar cult-in-a-cave clichés that one finds in any Tarzan or Mummy movie. The females of this lost race are conveniently gorgeous, scantily-clad humanoid beauties, while the males are brutal, ugly ogre types. They engage in bizarre rituals in which sacrifices are made to a vengeful god.

The Moon Pool might be a baby step above most pulp fiction of this era. There’s an actual sci-fi story going on here; it’s more than just boobs and bullets, though there’s some of that too. This premise and plot, however, only merit perhaps a novella, while Merritt tries to turn this into an extended epic. The result is a boring, drawn-out mess. There are so many overly protracted descriptions of architecture: yet another chamber with another pool or fountain, yet another light show or a curtain of colored mist. Who cares? Despite a couple of relatively exciting action scenes, the story is dominated by mystic mumbo jumbo and predictable romance. Merritt wrote a sequel to The Moon Pool, The Metal Monster, in which at least one of the characters returns, but I’m not likely to tune in for that encore performance.

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 by Ritchie Robertson

An erudite, pan-European survey of the era

Ritchie Robertson is a British academic who has published several books on German literature. With his most recent book, however, Robertson has broadened his scope to encompass the pan-European movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Published in 2021, Robertson’s book The Enlightenment is a sweeping synthesis that attempts to, and in my opinion succeeds in, providing a comprehensive summary of the era that encapsulates the intellectual and social landscape of the period.

Not surprisingly, Robertson focuses primarily on France, Britain, and Germany, but he does often reach farther afield into many other European nations, demonstrating that this was a truly continent-wide phenomenon. The United States doesn’t get a great deal of coverage. Jefferson and Franklin are occasionally discussed, and there’s a brief section on the American Revolution. Rather than examining specific nations or specific thinkers in turn, this book is organized thematically by issue or discipline. The result is much rapid jumping around among diverse locations and historical personages, but this approach helps in gaining an understanding of the overall zeitgeist and important debates in Enlightenment thought. Figures like Immanuel Kant, David Hume, or Voltaire are mentioned in almost every subchapter. If you wanted to get an overall picture of Kant’s thought, for example, you’d have to search around for two sentences here and three sentences there, but if you did so, you’d get a very good understanding of what Kant was all about.

The one thread that tied the myriad endeavors of the Enlightenment together was a striving for an improvement in the happiness of the human race, whether it be through technology, philosophy, politics, law, or some other means. That may seem like an obvious and simplistic answer. Hasn’t mankind always striven for happiness? Well, no, not really. For much of the past two thousand years the prevailing view (at least in the Western world) was that life is an ordeal to be endured so that one could be rewarded with happiness in the afterlife. The Enlightenment is often thought of as a period of extreme secularization and rising atheism, and there definitely was some turning away from prior superstitions and religious dogma, but Robertson asserts that the religious landscape of the Enlightenment was far more complex and heterogenous than widely assumed. The trend of the age was not necessarily antireligious but rather an effort to reconcile religion with reason, to question religion and theology in order to clarify them, so that religion is the product of active thought rather than passive acceptance.

Robertson’s study is not only through but also well-balanced. This isn’t just a book about how great certain Enlightenment thinkers were and what important political and scientific advances were made. Robertson also pays attention to the prejudices, superstitions, and ignorances active during this period. He presents the progress of Enlightenment thought as a series of debates, or exercises in trial and error, and gives as much consideration to those in the wrong as those in the right.

I takes a very skilled writer and researcher to encapsulate an era in one volume like this. Robertson’s book is comprehensive enough to serve as a textbook for an undergraduate course, but it doesn’t read like a textbook. The prose is accessible to general readers, and history buffs will find much food for fascination here. Robertson’s breadth of knowledge is impressive. He seems to have read just about everything published between the two dates in the subtitle, as well as the scholarly literature of recent years. For anyone interested in this period, the notes and bibliography are a treasure trove of further readings. Though I thought I had a good idea of what the Enlightenment was all about, Robertson really broadened my understanding and heightened my interest in this pivotal age in history.

Cosmos, Volume I by Alexander von Humboldt

All of the things that go to make Heaven and Earth

If you’re old enough, you may remember the classic 1980s television series Cosmos, created and hosted by the astronomer Carl Sagan. Or, you might recall the 2014 series Cosmos, a tribute to Sagan’s work, hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Both, however, stole the idea of Cosmos from Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Just as Sagan and Tyson were likely the most famous scientists in America at the time their TV shows were broadcast, Humboldt was probably the most famous scientist in the world when he published his late-career magnum opus Cosmos. This landmark work of science literature was published in five volumes, the first of which, the subject of this review, came out in 1849. Humboldt’s Cosmos is an attempt to synthesize all knowledge of the natural sciences up to the mid-nineteenth century. It reads as if Humboldt wrote it for his scientific peers, but Cosmos also enjoyed an immense popular readership in its day..

Humboldt unfurls his scientific overview in a systematic fashion, beginning with the large and moving to the small. He starts by discussing “nebulae” that we now know to be other galaxies. He then examines the various components of our solar system before moving on to the Earth’s seismic and volcanic activities and its rocks and minerals. Then it’s on to oceanography and climatology before finally arriving at life in the form of plants, animals, and humans. Although Humboldt proceeds with systematic rigor, he was also notoriously prone to digressions on whatever topics interested him. The book gets off to a slow start with about a hundred pages of introductory material in which he outlines how scientists should write about nature, how he’s going to write about it, and what exactly he’s going to tell you, before he ever gets around to telling it. As an example of Humboldt’s wandering mind, even in this “general” introduction, there is a three-page footnote about the elevation of the snow line on various mountains of the world. When he finally gets to his “General Review of Natural Phenomena,” delivers it in typical nineteenth-century fashion: all in one long chapter with no breaks or subheads. Humboldt gives special extended attention to some of his “pet” interests, such as the zodiacal light (sunlight reflecting off cosmic dust). The English edition that I read from 1868 (translation by E. C. Otté) has only one appendix; it’s about prehistoric birds in New Zealand.

It’s really interesting to learn about the state of science in 1849, and how scientists and explorers of that era went about obtaining knowledge of our universe. This was before the discovery of continental drift or Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but such revelations are certainly foreshadowed in this work. I’ve always admired Humboldt as an explorer and a naturalist, but when reading Cosmos one can’t help but admire him as a researcher. He seems to have read everything that had been published in four or five languages, no small feat when you consider how difficult it must have been just to get one’s hands on a specific book in those days, or how much time, effort, and patience was required for correspondence with one’s scientific colleagues.

Though he had an encyclopedic mind and a voracious appetite for specifics, as evidenced by some of the trivial rabbit holes he ventures down in this book, Humboldt was science’s master generalist. He was well-versed in a multitude of scientific disciplines, and his writings emphasize how all natural phenomena are intricately connected into a cohesive and interdependent whole. In this regard, Humboldt was the founder of ecology as we know it. In the introduction to Cosmos, he explains that he wants to write a work that assembles precise empirical data but never loses sight of the essential beauty and wonder of nature, the emotional effect so important to the Romantic movement. As far as imparting the beauty and sublimity of nature is concerned, Humboldt was more successful with his earlier work Views of Nature. Cosmos, on the other hand, reads more like a relentless torrent of data, but it’s a fascinating torrent to mentally bathe oneself in. Reading Cosmos is like living vicariously through a golden age of natural science, as if you were one of Humboldt’s associates. It’s a difficult read, not for everybody, but if you enjoy science history, a trek through Volume I of Cosmos is an inspiring and enlightening experience.  

Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery by Jules Verne

Robinson Crusoe fantasy camp

Not too long ago, in reviewing The Swiss Family Robinson by John David Wyss, I briefly touched upon the profound influence that Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe has had on world literature. That novel clearly had an affect on Jules Verne, who wrote at least a handful of “robinsonades” and included Crusoe-like plot elements in many of his novels of travel and exploration. Verne’s adventure novel L’école des Robinsons was published in 1882. The French title literally translates into The School for Robinsons, and the book has been published in English as School for Crusoes and An American Robinson Crusoe. The 1883 London translation of the novel, however, was entitled Godfrey Morgan, after its protagonist.

Godfrey, an orphan, was raised by his uncle, the billionaire William W. Kolderup of San Francisco. Kolderup also has an adopted daughter, Phina, with whom Godfrey is conveniently betrothed. (Almost every Verne novel features a pair of young lovers engaged to be married.) Before he ties the knot, however, young Godfrey wants to travel the world. Having never ventured far outside of the gilded cage in which he was brought up, Godfrey now has a spell of wanderlust. His future father-in-law grants Godfrey his consent to embark on a round-the-world voyage, provided he is chaperoned by his tutor, Prof. Artelett, a dandy who teaches dancing and deportment. The two head west across the Pacific Ocean towards New Zealand but never make it there. Their ship is wrecked in a storm, and the crew is lost. The two gentlemen from San Francisco find themselves marooned alone on a deserted island.

Much like the original Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, these two castaways enjoy a number of fortunate boons. All of the livestock from their ship miraculously makes it to shore, a box washes up on the beach containing many implements necessary for survival, and a hollow sequoia presents itself as a makeshift townhouse. This is not the most arduous of survival stories. Godfrey and Artelett spend most of their time gathering roots and occasionally shooting a deer. These fellows are far less industrious than the Swiss Family. In order to add some excitement to the proceedings, Verne brings in perils that belong on an entirely different continent. Eventually all is explained, though the explanation is ridiculous.

Though Verne is famous for his science fiction, little science is employed in the survival of these two gentlemen. Typical of Verne, however, this novel is largely a secular, rationalist take on the Crusoe genre. Although obligatory mention is made of the almighty every now and then, this wilderness sojourn is not a meditation on divinity like the pious contemplations of Crusoe and the Swiss. Unfortunately, there are a couple racist comments about dark-skinned islanders here. In general, I’ve found Verne to be more enlightened than many of his contemporaries, but he was still guilty of the ignorance and prejudices of his era.

There isn’t much mystery to this “Californian Mystery.” Verne sets up the plot so that every event is telegraphed well ahead of time. You’d have to be ten years old or less not to see where this story is going. Everything is so obvious that it must have been intentional by Verne to let the audience in on secrets to which Godfrey and Artelett are not privy. Does that strategy pay off? Well, so-so. This isn’t one of Verne’s more intelligent or exciting novels, but it is moderately fun, and the characters are likable. If you’ve read any of Verne beyond his two or three more famous books, then you probably know what to expect, and Godfrey Morgan neither disappoints nor exceeds those expectations.

Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years—What Really Happened by Clinton Heylin

More than most fans want to know, and not who you want to hear it from

Although I’m not a true Christian believer, I love Bob Dylan’s gospel period. He made some fine rock and roll from 1979 to 1981 and assembled some excellent musicians to perform it. Dylan’s born-again Christian spell, which encompassed the albums Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, is generally not well-regarded by critics or fans. At the time, some concert-goers expressed outrage that Dylan was only playing his new Christian rock tunes in concert while ignoring his Greatest Hits. This period in Dylan’s musical career perhaps enjoyed a slight resurgence in appreciation with the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More in 2017. To capitalize on the release of that official collection of previously unreleased material, frequent Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin published his book Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Years—What Really Happened, also released in 2017.

Heylin takes the “What Really Happened” in the subtitle very literally. His main concern here is to establish a detailed chronology of events, such as the first time Dylan played “Slow Train” in a rehearsal, the first time he attended the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in LA, the last time he played “Saved” in concert, and so on. In great detail, Heylin recaps every recording session, tour rehearsal, concert performance, and on-stage sermon that took place over these three years, as well as newspaper and magazine reviews of Dylan’s concerts and Dylan’s reactions to those reviews. Much attention is accorded to any change in concert playlist or album track selection. It’s a lot of trivial detail, but as a Dylan fan, and in particular a fan of this period, I found all this interesting. Heylin’s research is commendable. If you don’t mind seeing the trees rather than the forest, this book is for you. If, however, you really want to understand Dylan’s religious beliefs, the religious content of his songs, or why he embarked on this gospel trip in the first place, you’re not going to find that here. Thankfully, however, we have Scott Marshall’s excellent 2017 book Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life to enlighten us on such deeper matters.

What I really don’t like about Trouble in Mind is Heylin’s tone and attitude. First of all, his prose reads as if it were written for a group of his buddies. It’s rather casual and snarky, and Heylin seems too pleased with his own clever turns of phrase. When you’re acting as a journalist and a historian, whether you like it or not, write with a little professionalism and formality. This isn’t a fanzine. Even if you hate Heylin’s prose, however, much of the text is quoted from other sources that are better written.

After reading this book, I have to ask, does Heylin even like Dylan’s music? He certainly doesn’t care much for this gospel era. He frequently states that Saved and Shot of Love are terrible albums, full of lackluster performances. Obviously, I like this period of Dylan’s career or I wouldn’t be reading your book, so why would I want to read about how much this music sucks? Heylin frequently repeats the old chestnut that the studio recordings don’t hold up to the live performances, which is the same gripe you often hear from your friends who like to brag about how many concerts they’ve seen. Heylin thinks it’s his god-given mission to inform you of what he considers Dylan’s every fault and stupid mistake in these three years of his career, whether it’s songs he left off albums, records delivered later than promised, unproductive rehearsal sessions, or song arrangements that Heylin didn’t agree with. This is a relentlessly negative portrait of Dylan as a sloppy, foolish, absent-minded buffoon that the reader is supposed to chuckle along with. Heylin writes as if he’s too good for Dylan. No, you’re not better than the guy you make your living off of. We know he’s quirky, makes messy music, and sometimes weird decisions, but he’s still the greatest rock singer-songwriter of all time and a deserving Nobel laureate. Marshall wrote a book that treats him as such. Heylin has not.

A Dream of John Ball by William Morris

Renaissance fair socialism

William Morris (1834–1896) was an English author, visual artist, textile designer, and socialist agitator. As the most prominent artist in the British Arts and Crafts movement, Morris created drawings, paintings, book illustrations, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass windows that harkened back to the Middle Ages. He was also a rather prolific man of letters, and his literary works, not surprisingly, were likewise often set in medieval times. His novel A Dream of John Ball was published in 1888.

The narrator of the novel is a present-day Englishman of the 1880s who falls asleep and dreams himself back into the Middle Ages. Specifically, he finds himself amid the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a rebellion that swept across large portions of England. Serfs fighting for the right to own property and be their own masters rose up in arms against the regime of King Richard II. The narrator falls into a band of such rebels in County Kent. The inspirational leader of this cadre of freedom fighters is John Ball, a real-life clergyman whom Morris portrays as a sort of Robin Hood figure. Jack Straw, another historical figure from the revolt, also appears in the novel.

After quickly being accepted into this band of rebels, the narrator fights along side them in an encounter with the king’s forces. In this battle that takes up roughly the first half of the novel, Morris indulges his ardor for medieval culture, lovingly describing in vivid detail all the garments, weaponry, and accoutrements of these 14th-century warriors. This extended action sequence reads like a few chapters disembodied from Ivanhoe or some other Sir Walter Scott novel. There’s much medieval pageantry and heroic derring-do but not much of a story. Morris emphasizes the fellowship between these daring and forthright men while implying that such fellowship no longer exists in the modern world. In Morris’s eyes, this picturesque world of medieval farmers and craftsmen would have been an idyllic utopia, were it not for the oppression they endured under feudalism.

The second half of the novel is an improvement over the first. When the narrator finally sits down to talk to John Ball, the story actually goes somewhere and has a purpose. Ball can somehow sense that his conversation partner is a visitor from the future. He asks the narrator if his dream of equality and brotherhood of man will ever come to fruition. The narrator regrettably informs Ball that although serfdom and feudalism would cease to exist in England, men will still be bound as wage-slaves within an oppressive system run by greedy oligarchs. Although much has changed in half a millennium, the ultimate status of the common man has changed little. He proceeds to explain capitalism in lingo evocative of the Middle Ages, with many thees and thous and the use of antiquated words like “villeins” and “thralls” instead of “serfs” or “proletariats.” The Peasant’s Revolt is regarded by some radicals as an inspirational prototype (albeit unsuccessful) for a socialist revolution. While there is no hope for John Ball’s rebels, Morris encourages readers of 1888 to hold out hope for an overthrow of the oligarchy and freedom for the common man.

Morris is regarded as a pioneer of the science fiction and fantasy genres in English literature. A Dream of John Ball is merely a baby step in that direction. The only science fiction element is the time travel, which takes place in a dream and therefore could just be the narrator’s imagination. A couple years after this novel, Morris would write a more overtly sci-fi and more overtly socialist work, News from Nowhere, which is superior to A Dream of John Ball in just about every way I can think of. Nevertheless, the second half of A Dream of John Ball is well-conceived, eloquently executed, and daringly outspoken for its time.

The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor Storm

Dark Frisian fable of seawalls and specters

Theodor Storm (1817-1888) was a German writer, but he comes from a very specific area of Germany, North Frisia in Schlesweig-Holstein, that has a mixed cultural history of German, Dutch, and Danish influences. He was born on the coast of the Wadden Sea, which is presumably the setting of his novel The Rider on the White Horse, published in 1888. I don’t believe the word Frisia is ever used in the novel, but I assume this story is meant to take place on the German stretch of the coast. To an American reader unfamiliar with the region, however, this novel that’s largely about dike building will seem Dutcher than an orange tulip growing out of a wooden shoe.

An anonymous narrator traveling along the coast comes across a rider on a white horse. The rider has a crazed look with glowing eyes and an overall Headless Horseman vibe, but with head intact. The narrator then pulls into a nearby inn where he asks the locals about this fearsome apparition. There in the tavern, and later in his home, the town schoolmaster regales the traveler, and us, with the origin story of this mysterious horse and rider.

The schoolmasters’s tale flashes back to the 1740s and ‘50s. Hauke Haien is the son of a farmer and surveyor of middling means. Though born and raised on a farm, Hauke is not really cut out for farming, or at least his heart isn’t in it. He is more interested in book learning and has a head for engineering. In his teens, Hauke’s father manages to get him a position as an apprentice to the dike master, the official who is responsible for overseeing the dikes that protect the local farmers’ lands from the sea. An added bonus of this job is that Hauke gets to spend time with the dike master’s lovely daughter Elke, with whom he forms a close bond. Hauke would like to become dike master himself some day, but that position usually goes to the wealthiest landowner in town. If he wants the job, therefore, Hauke must strive to elevate himself above his modest status and financial means.

There’s a whole lot about dike building in this novel. This was at a time when all the work was done moving earth with shovels, carts, and horses. I sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what Storm was saying in regard to the design, construction, and workings of the dikes, but it didn’t affect my appreciation of the human story. Although there are elements of this novel that make it feel like a fable or fairy tale, the book provides a realist view of the lives of the farming community in this time and place. After reading this novel, I find it amazing that anyone can live in these coastal lands reclaimed from the sea, with nothing but a handmade wall of dirt protecting their homes and crops from flooding and devastation.

Storm is regarded as one of the most important figures in German literary realism. Though this story is primarily realistic, it does have some supernatural elements, including the implication that God is expressing himself through nature to either benefit or punish the characters. One admirable aspect of the book is Storm’s sensitive portrayal of a child with a developmental disability. The characters here feel real, and it is easy to sympathize with them. If this is intended as a fable, the moral is not obvious. Is this merely a case of bad things happen to good people? I presume that we are supposed to find Hauke guilty of the sins of pride and ambition, which he pays for with the hardships that befall him, like Icarus flying too close to the sun. From the perspective of this 21st-century reader, however, his ambition just seems like hard-working industriousness, for which he should be rewarded, not castigated. More pious readers of the 1880s would have seen it differently. Nevertheless, I found this a compelling story, very well told by Storm, and I learned an interesting thing or two about North Frisia.

The Delphi Classics Collected Works of Eugene O’Neill

Complete up to a point

Eugene O’Neill is one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American theatre. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. Over the years, I have enjoyed reading a few of his plays, so I decided to read (or reread) his complete works. Whenever I want to buy a classic author’s work in bulk, I turn to the Delphi Classics. They make the best, most complete ebook collections of classic literature. Because of the United States’ severe copyright laws, Delphi has produced two versions of O’Neill’s oeuvre. The rest of the world gets his Complete Works. The USA, however, only gets the Collected Works—that is, everything up to 1929, the cut-off point for works to fall into the (copyright-free) public domain. Rather than list what this volume includes, it’s easier to list what it’s missing: Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, Days Without End, More Stately Mansions, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hughie, and A Touch of the Poet. Unfortunately, that list includes a few of O’Neill’s greatest works, but we’ll have to wait a few years before their copyright expires. Presumably, Delphi will update their ebook files with additional titles when they become available, as they have done with their other ebook collections.

Delphi’s Collected Works includes all of O’Neill’s one-act plays except for Hughie (1941). Of these twenty short dramas, very few are masterpieces, but overall they provide a revealing look into how O’Neill’s style and choice of themes developed over the years. O’Neill’s one original short story, “Tomorrow,” is also included here, as well as over sixty of his poems. Some additional rare odds and ends, not published until long after O’Neill’s death, are not surprisingly absent from this collection.

Among the full-length plays (say an hour and a half or longer on the stage), the highlights of this collection are The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, Beyond the Horizon, and Strange Interlude. To be honest, the bad outweigh the good in this collection, but if you really want to get an idea of the arc of an author’s career, you have to read the bad as well as the good. Some real stinkers include Welded, Servitude, and The Great God Brown. Although O’Neill is known for realist plays about family dynamics, alcoholism, and the lives of New England sailors, it is interesting to find him venturing out of his comfort zone with experiments like history plays—The Fountain, Marco Millions, and Lazarus Laughed—and kabuki-type masked productions—The Great God Brown and again, Lazarus Laughed. The Hairy Ape and Strange Interlude are two cases where O’Neill’s modernist experimentation successfully paid off.

Since all of the content included herein is in the public domain, you could download all of these writings from the internet for free. It is worth it, however, to spend the three bucks to get them all together in one convenient package from Delphi. Although their ebooks aren’t perfect, Delphi is by far the most conscientious editor and producer of ebook bundles of classic literature. They actually put some diligent research into compiling these collections. Works are arranged chronologically. Some of the more important individual plays get introductory synopses discussing the original stage productions and critical response. Also, the ebook is illustrated with a scattering of photographs picturing O’Neill at different stages in his life, places he lived and worked, and title pages and posters for his plays. In print form, the Library of America has a well-edited and well-produced complete works of O’Neill in three volumes, but those might set you back a pretty penny. In ebook form, The Delphi Classics Collected Works of Eugene O’Neill is the best an American reader is going to get, and it’s well worth the nominal charge incurred.  

The Devil’s Paw by E. Phillips Oppenheim

World War I spy plot with anti-Red sermonizing

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was a very successful author of fiction involving espionage, intrigue, mystery, and crime. From 1887 to 1943, he published over 100 novels. The Great Impersonation (1920) is generally regarded as his best work. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you which of his books are supposed to be good or bad. When I’m in the mood for some Oppenheim, I just pick one at random, based on title. The Devil’s Paw, also published in 1920, is the ninth Oppenheim novel that I’ve read thus far.

Two friends sit before the fire in a hunting cottage near the coast of Norfolk, England. The owner of said cottage is Miles Furley, a parliamentary representative for the Labor Party. Julian Orden is a wealthy aristocrat who lives at his parents’ palatial estate nearby. Mommy and Daddy Orden host a who’s who of aristocrats at their mansion. Among the frequent house guests is the current Prime Minister of England. The year is 1917 or 1918. World War I is underway, and the Americans have joined the fight. Part of Furley’s wartime duties as a coastal landowner is to patrol the shoreline looking for suspicious activity. This evening, however, he injures his leg and asks Orden to cover his shift. While making his rounds on the beach, Orden spies a mysterious figure picking up a canister from the surf, presumably containing a message from a German submarine. Before he can make a move to intercept the spy, however, Orden is struck on the head and knocked unconscious. The next day, he finds evidence that one of his parents’ party guests, a beautiful Russian woman, may be involved in the treasonous act he witnessed on the beach. 

I’ve never been blown away by an Oppenheim novel, but I generally find them moderately entertaining. I wanted to like The Devil’s Paw, but this story kept letting me down. The plot here involves socialists. Rather than proletariats, however, most of the would-be radicals depicted here are wealthy, paternalistic socialists. Oppenheim isn’t really interested in people who work for a living. He thinks that aristocrats are the only people worth writing about, and the only people capable of running the world. Here he pays lip service to the cause of socialism and labor, but one never really gets the feeling that his heart is in it. Orden, the hero of the novel, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just happens to dabble in labor politics. The villain is the guy who wears shabby clothes and doesn’t like opera. The result is a jingoistic propaganda piece in which socialism is portrayed as a scam and pacifism is portrayed as evil.

Although this book was published between the two World Wars, Oppenheim’s fiction is still very much stuck in the Victorian Era of the 1880s or ‘90s. One annoying convention from that age is the idea that women can commit no evil. In Oppenheim’s world, the most heinous crime a man can commit is treason, but if the perpetrator is a beautiful, upper-class female, the gentlemanly thing to do is look the other way. (Of course, if she’s of the servant class, she could be shot or hanged for espionage, no problem.) Oppenheim also tries hard to create some sexual tension between his male and female leads, but that’s awfully hard to do when his characters and intended audience are stuck in an idealized gentility wherein you can’t even kiss someone without being willing to back it up with a wedding ring.

If you know anything about history, you know how the spy plot is going to turn out. Oppenheim can’t change the outcome of the Great War. Thus, the only possible thrills would have to come from having the characters threatened with peril. There’s surprisingly little danger in this thriller, however. It mostly reads like a series of political debates, the outcome of which is a foregone conclusion, given Oppenheim’s monarchical bent. Oppenheim should’ve stuck to writing novels about the rich and powerful and left the socialists out of it. He’s clearly out of his element here.

Deluge by S. Fowler Wright

Ahead-of-its-time post-apocalyptic thriller

S. Fowler Wright (1874–1965) was a British author of genre fiction active from the 1920s through the 1950s. His science fiction novel Deluge was published in 1928. The book was an immediate bestseller and Wright’s first big commercial success. Deluge was adapted into a Hollywood movie in 1933.

The novel opens with a brief prelude that informs us that the Earth has been struck by a catastrophe of unusual seismic activity causing land masses to sink and sea levels to rise. This cataclysm is accompanied by fierce storms delivering pouring rain, stronger-than-hurricane winds, huge rogue waves, and fires caused by broken gas lines. After the prelude, the narrative backtracks to day one of this disaster and follows an English family as their daily life is disrupted by this apocalypse. As the novel progresses, other characters are introduced, their experiences related, and eventually all their storylines become intertwined. England, where this novel takes place, is reduced to a scattering of small islands separated by miles of water. A few buildings remain standing, and some livestock survives. The human survivors of these islands are rapidly forming themselves into gangs that may be the seeds of a new civilization, but the absence of government, law, and essential services has brought out the worst in humanity.

Considering it was published almost a hundred years ago, I was impressed by how bluntly realistic this novel is. Rather than a story from 1928, Deluge reads like it could have been a 21st-century post-apocalyptic thriller. In fact, I found this more intelligent and compelling than many recent movies about dystopian futures. There are no mutants or zombies in Deluge. Wright concentrates on what happens to human nature when mankind is thrust back into Iron Age living conditions. One consideration Wright explores very frankly is what would happen to women in such a situation. They are outnumbered by male survivors, who want to possess and use them like property. Wright doesn’t shy away from the distasteful aspects of this dilemma, but confronts it matter-of-factly. Women of the 1920s, I would assume, enjoyed less independence and had fewer opportunities to kick ass than women of today. Nevertheless, here Wright delivers a realistic female lead who is admirably intelligent, resourceful, athletic, and can hold her own in a battle against men.

The first half of Deluge is excellent as Wright unfolds his vision of what life would be like after such a doomsday scenario. At about the halfway point of the novel, however, Wright goes into some extended action sequences of siege, abduction, and escape that just go on way too long. Like a drawn-out chess game, he examines every facet of these encounters in minute detail. Where is each character standing at a given time? What happens if they move in this direction, or that? Whose carrying what gear on which horse? It’s just too much logistical minutiae. These chaotic action scenes distract from the larger issues of how human nature and morality change when survival becomes the primary motivator. The new society is ruled by might makes right, until a small community decides they want to adopt a form of government. Wright’s wishful-thinking solution to that problem—a variation on the benevolent autocracy of a philosopher/king—is neither believable nor attractive. The ending of the book is also a bit of a let-down in the too-convenient way in which potentially thorny issues are wrapped up neatly.

The story is told by an unnamed narrator of the post-apocalyptic future who occasionally offers up commentary on aspects of our present society: capitalism, women’s rights, capital punishment, environmental devastation, the frivolous entertainments on which we waste our time, and so on. This aspect of the book is very well done. Overall, the strengths of Deluge outweigh its disappointments. I was impressed by Wright’s writing; his sci-fi reads more like our contemporaries (2025) than his contemporaries (1928). A year after Deluge, Wright published a sequel entitled Dawn.

The Misty Harbour by Georges Simenon

Maigret on the Waterfront

The Misty Harbour, published in 1932, is the 15th novel in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret mystery novels and the 30th book from that series that I have read and reviewed so far. The book’s original French title is Les port des brumes, and it has also been published in English under varying configurations of Death of a Harbor Master. The Maigret books are consistently good but not always excellent. The Misty Harbour is one of the better ones. This mystery grabs you from page one and keeps you gripped until the very end.

As the title indicates, The Misty Harbour takes place in a fog-bound seaside town: Ouistreham on the coast of Calvados, Normandy. This town serves as the seaport to the city of Caen, to which it is connected via a canal. In Paris, where Maigret serves as the superintendant of the Police Judiciaire, a John Doe is found wandering the streets. He has no memory of his identity, appears to have suffered some brain damage, and has lost the power of speech. The man has a gunshot wound to his cranium that appears to have received some medical attention. The Paris police send out newspaper articles to help ascertain the mystery man’s identity. His housekeeper responds, identifying him as Yves Joris, the harbor master at Ouistreham. She has no idea what happened to him or why he’s in Paris. Maigret accompanies Joris and the housekeeper on the train back to Ouistreham to investigate the cause of the harbor master’s injury. Shortly after arriving in the coastal town, Joris drops dead, apparently murdered by poison.

In Ouistreham, social life revolves around the waterfront tavern la Buvette de la Marine. Maigret makes several visits to the establishment to toss back a few beers with the local inhabitants and find out what they know, but nobody’s talking. The population of the town consists mostly of sailors and other working men who make their living from the sea. Many of them speak the Breton language. These men make frequent trips to England, the Netherlands, or Norway to ship goods to and from Caen. A few upper-class inhabitants, who have made their fortunes in the shipping industry, also have homes in Ouistreham. Among these is the town’s mayor, Monsieur Grandmaison, a particularly prickly character who seems to have something to hide. He repeatedly butts heads with Maigret and challenges the inspector’s authority.

Having read so many Maigret novels, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sometimes foresee where Simenon’s mystery plots are going, but this case was sufficiently perplexing that I couldn’t figure out what was going on until all is revealed in the final chapter. Atypical of Maigret novels, this one sports a few action scenes, violence included, in which Maigret gives and takes blows with the rough and tumble sailors of Ouistreham. Sailors and bargemen are frequently featured in Maigret novels. Simenon clearly has an affinity for those who live and work at sea or on the canals of France, as seen in such novels as Lock 14, The Grand Banks Café, The Flemish House, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, and Maigret and the Bum. One of the joys of reading the Maigret books is learning about different aspects of life in France, and The Misty Harbour provides a vivid glimpse into the maritime lifestyle on the Norman coast in the 1930s. In all respects, The Misty Harbour is an exceptional example of Simenon’s and Maigret’s work, one well worth reading for fans or newcomers to the series.

The Child of the Cavern, or The Underground City by Jules Verne

Home sweet coal mine

Jules Verne’s novel Les Indes noires (“The Black Indies”) was published in 1877. It has been published in English under various titles, including The Child of the Cavern, The Underground City, Strange Doings Underground, and Black Diamonds. Unfortunately, some of those English titles reveal more about the plot than they should. This is a science fiction adventure novel about a coal mine, the science in this case being geology.

James Starr was the head engineer at the Aberfoyle Mine near Edinburgh, Scotland. Ten years prior to the start of the novel, that mine was shut down, its resources deemed exhausted. As the story opens, Starr receives a letter from his right-hand man at Aberfoyle, the former overseer Simon Ford. The mysterious message begs Starr to come to Aberfoyle immediately. Although the mine has been inactive for a decade, Ford never left. He lives inside the mine with his wife and 25-year-old son Harry, in a cottage thirty stories beneath the earth. Starr descends into the mine to visit the Fords, and Simon lets him in on his recent amazing discovery. At the end of one of Aberfoyle’s underground passages, Simon has found firedamp (flammable gases) issuing forth from crevices in the rock, a strong indication that a bed of coal exists behind the walls. He speculates that the mine may have some riches left in her yet, in the form of a mother lode of undiscovered coal. Ford and his family may not be the only parties to have made this discovery, however. There is evidence that some mystery person has been wandering in the caverns of Aberfoyle, perhaps with evil intentions.

I’ve always admired the fact that Verne could make a science fiction novel out of just about any field of science. He proved that scientific romances (the 19th-century term for the genre) didn’t have to be about outer space or utopian or dystopian futures. Verne wrote novels about all sorts of scientific phenomena that struck his fancy, from aeronautics (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1873) to paleontology (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1867) to oceanography (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1871). I’ve never been fascinated with coal mines, but Verne managed to keep me interested with this subterranean adventure. In fact, he makes coal mines sound like the most wonderful places on earth. All the characters want to live and work in one, so much so that they rarely make trips to the surface. Verne’s books are also known for their geographical content and often educate the reader on exotic locales. In this novel, however, the reader doesn’t really learn a whole lot about Scotland, because so much time is spent underground.

While The Child of the Cavern is grounded in geological fact, this story gets pretty farfetched, even for Verne standards. As previously alluded to, people spend inordinate amounts of time deep underground. God only knows what they’re eating. And don’t get me started on Harfang (a secret better left unrevealed). One must suspend quite a bit of disbelief to enjoy this novel. The plot here is a little like a Scooby Doo mystery, one of the less satisfying ones where the “ghost” unmasks to reveal an unfamiliar character. As is often the case with Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, there is a sinister villain here, as well as a couple of young lovers eager to get married when the crisis is resolved. This is not one of Verne’s greater works. It’s an obscurity, and probably deserves to be so, but if you can get in touch with your inner twelve-year-old, it is a fun ride.

The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

Disturbing trip inside a mind losing grip on reality

Welsh author Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams was published in 1907. Its protagonist, Lucian Taylor, is the son of a clergyman. Lucian and his widower father live on the outskirts of a rural Welsh village named Caermaern. Lucian is very intelligent, but not in the conventional good-grades way. He loves books and enjoys filling his mind with esoteric, mostly useless knowledge. A social outsider, Lucian frequently wanders alone through the countryside. He develops a fascination for the local Roman ruins and all things antiquarian and reads works on the occult. From such subject matter, he creates an interior fantasy world that serves as a paradisiacal refuge from the world of everyday society. Lucian is smart enough to pursue university studies, but he doesn’t have the money to do so. I don’t know enough about the Welsh clergy to understand how a country parson goes poor, but Lucian and his father live in relative squalor. Lucian is caught in the catch-22 of can’t get an education without money and can’t earn money without an education. He decides to become a writer and devotes all of his energies to that goal. The practice of writing becomes almost a religious obsession with him, entwined with his pagan fantasy land. Lucian’s literary career is an uphill battle, however, and he experiences failure and frustration in his chosen vocation.

Through the eyes of this outsider, Machen satirizes the British literary scene and the British class system. The rich residents of Lucian’s town look down on him for his poverty, while they themselves are depicted as pompous, shallow hypocrites. As a writer, Lucian yearns to create a timeless masterpiece for the ages, but he is constantly reminded, by literary critics and well-meaning neighbors, that the insipid popular novel is where success lies. Underlying the story of Lucian’s coming-of-age, The Hill of Dreams is an expression of Machen’s ideas on literature and the arts. His is a bleak and cynical outlook reminiscent of Jack London’s Martin Eden.

Machen is best-known today as an author of horror fiction. (Stephen King is a fan.) Is The Hill of Dreams horror? Not by today’s standards. It’s more of a psychological tragedy with an overall tone reminiscent of the deliberate dreariness of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. The novel charts Lucian’s gradual descent into madness. The reader roots for this young man, hoping he’ll find some happiness, but it becomes harder to get behind him as he becomes more and more disturbingly unhinged. Lucian’s story illustrates how someone like a John Hinckley Jr., Mark David Chapman, or Ted Kaczynski might have been created. About 90 percent of this novel, however, happens inside of Lucian’s head, so he never goes so far as to commit actions similar to those aforementioned psychopaths.

Those with antisocial tendencies can’t help but identify to some extent with Lucian. Polite society is replete with superficial pretense. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get along without it? This is a book that speaks to misanthropes and misfits. Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian likewise speaks to that audience, but reassures such misanthropes that there are others out there like you, your narcissism is justified, you are superior to the human herd, and someday you will be discovered by your misfit brethren. Machen offers no such consolation in The Hill of Dreams. We sympathize with Lucian, but there is no doubt he has gone off the rails, beyond the point of reason or justification.

Machen writes brilliant, exquisite prose. There’s hardly a sentence in this book that wouldn’t qualify as a quotable line of poetry. The plot, or lack thereof, does get repetitive and drag on in its relentless chronicling of Lucian’s deranged thoughts. Nevertheless, this is a deep and compelling work. One reading might not be enough to fully appreciate everything Machen put into this.