The Blind Owl by Saghegh Hedayat. Translated from the Farsi by D. P. Costello. Introduction by Porochista Khakpour. Grove Press, 146 pages, $14.

The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost by Kim Sok-pom. Translated from the Japanese, and with an Introduction by Cindi L. Textor. Columbia University Press, 144 pages, $24.50.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Before talking about the artful complexity in The Blind Owl or the satiric playfulness in The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, attention must be paid, especially during the Halloween season, to their memorable images of horror, from the macabre hallucinogenic visions that bedevil the narrators in Saghegh Hedayat’s haunting tale of mental meltdown to the waves of blood that surge through Kim Sok-pom’s disturbing send-up (?) of the tall tale, an exploration of the “living dead” anchored in the real-life brutality exercised by the South Korean government on an armed peasant uprising in the island of Cheju-do in 1948. Make no mistake about it – both books are more than a little scary, mainly because they bottle up Gothic energies rather than let them run wild.

In her introduction to The Blind Owl, contemporary novelist Prorochista Khakpour pays homage to the power of Hedayat’s novel, a cornerstone of contemporary Iranian literature that endures (since its serialization in 1941–1942) as both a critical and popular success, despite periodic censorship in Hedayat’s homeland. As a child, Khakpour wanted to read it badly, but her Iranian father refused to have it in the house, insisting that he would see to it that “she never got her hands on it …” because “it had caused many suicides in Iran after it was published. …. And, well, if you must know, the author also committed suicide.” Hedayat gassed himself to death in 1951; his masterpiece reflects a sensibility that doesn’t rebel against the solace of religion so much as finds it purely of aesthetic interest

Of course, when Khakpour became older she read the dangerous book. Surprisingly, given the build-up, The Blind Owl not only met her expectations but exceeded them. Not that the novel made her suicidal, though she found it disturbing. She saw that Hedayat treats madness with the wizardly acuity and finesse of Edgar Allan Poe. Khakpour mentions Franz Kafka as another influence on the book, but for me the book melds many of Poe’s central motifs –  solipsism edging into dementia, the decomposition of mind and body, the perverse attraction of self-destruction – with modernist techniques. The result is an intricate version of “A Tell Tale Heart” that’s set in a hall of mirrors.  Heydayat is the real missing artistic link, rather than the ghastly American H.P. Lovecraft, between Poe and the sophisticated psychological horror of today.

The Blind Owl is divided into two parts: in the first, a young opium-besotted narrator, who ekes out a living by illustrating pens, has a vision of a mysterious woman (“An angel of hell”) who embodies a delusive key to the universe: “One glance from her and mysteries and secrets would no longer have existed for me.” Her apparent demise sends her monomaniacal suitor, who at one point contemplates necrophilia, “falling into an infinite abyss in an everlasting night.”  The second half of the novel grows out of the the first half, but it features an older, much more aggressively insane narrator, also addicted to opium, obsessed with murdering his despised wife, whom he believes is unfaithful. As his body mysteriously decomposes, surreal  images and incidents  (such as that of men battling with cobras in pitch black rooms) return from the earlier section of the book, though in twisted or ‘reverse negative” form.

Through the intricate patterning, the exotic imagery, the creepy crawl to the inevitable act of violence, Heydayat elegantly conveys the most harrowing nightmares of the inner life: “The sensation of horror as usual aroused in me a feeling of exquisite, intoxicating pleasure which made my head swim and my knees give way and filled me with nausea.”  The Blind Owl, in D.P. Costello’s solid 1957 translation, lives up to its international reputation as an extraordinary depiction of the clotted spirit, the dissolute mind dedicated to constructing emblems of its fate, consciousness trapped in a self-made web of  love and hate, spirituality and degradation, pleasure and pain. If  the book leaves you shaken don’t blame me for putting it into your hands.

Kim Sok-Pom’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, first published in 1970, also imagines a form of death-in-life, though the story’s folk tale approach, with its sardonic supernatural trappings, takes a more overtly political form, perhaps because it was written by a zainichi, “a permanent resident of Japan who is not of Japanese ancestry.” Kim was born in Japan; his Korean parents immigrated from the island of Cheju-do. The author chose to write in Japanese, but there is no mistaking his existential sense of humanity lost somewhere betwixt and between – between colonial subject and colonizer, human and inhuman,  heaven and hell. The book appears be an “inspiring” yarn of the marginal (perhaps in ghostly form) striking back at the tyrannical, but it consistently undercuts being a simple allegory of good versus evil, suggesting that sin has spread to the point that “heaven and earth are full of bitter spirits who keep screaming and searching for something…”

The book’s protagonist, a priest named Mandogi, is a physically strong but mentally limited man whose elemental religious belief, despite his sadistic mistreatment by the powerful, strengthens his sense of morality.  His instinctual inner life is governed by a simple piety that makes him easy to take advantage of and at times comical. Still, some find his humanity ironically threatening: “He had a habit of staring gently at people, his eyes glowing deeply like those of an innocent, unselfish child. People couldn’t stand his stare for long, but he didn’t know how else to look at them.” Yet Mandogi’s unearthly (Dostoyevskian?)  saintliness doesn’t restrain him from an act of violent revenge.

Iranian author Sadegh Hedaya: An heir to Edgar Allan Poe

Mandogi’s vengeance, triggered by the Four-Three Incident of 1948, is symptomatic of the heinous horrors taking place daily on Cheju-do. With the apparent complicity of the American government, the South Korean police and special forces are crushing an armed peasant revolt – perhaps controlled by communist sympathizers – with sadistic brutality. The authorities are burning villages, raping women, torturing anyone suspected of being a rebel. (“In our Republic of Korea,” boasts a police captain, “as long as you don’t agree with commie ideas,  you’re allowed to rape, steal, and murder.”) Compounding this vision of degradation, Kim includes a flashback to Mandogi’s bleak time as a work slave in a Japanese chromium mine. The predominate color of the latter part of the book is red, from images of conflagrations and subversive political “reds”  to scenes awash in blood (“In the blink of an eye, the  room has become a slaughterhouse, the room swelling with blood, filthy blood”).  Kim intimates that this is history’s horror show, scarlet crimes repressed deep in the crevices of Korean and Japanese memory.

This may make the book sound grim, but it isn’t. Kim balances, albeit clumsily, a number of emotional tones, from the fractured fairy tale doings of Mandogi’s life in the temple to his truly bizarre sexual encounters, instances of apocalyptic terror giving way to wry comedy, such as this amusing description of an officer struggling to record a prisoner’s forced confession: “This was the first time he was asked to write something down, and he couldn’t get the tip of his pen to touch down gently, as if it was a plane crash landing.” Translator Cindi L.Texor is generally up to the challenge, but sometimes her sentences leave the reader a bit baffled: ” The violent sound, which had emphasized the silence and reticence in the room, was resounding in its emptiness.”

The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost succeeds as a very dark black comedy, almost Swiftian in its ferocity. Even “ghosts,” such as the hapless Mandogi, have to rethink how they go about frightening flesh-and-blood targets who have been coarsened by unspeakable atrocities: “On this island, where the victims of untimely deaths are piled high, all the way to the heavens, perhaps it could be said that the ghosts have had to reevaluate how they go about haunting.” For Kim, the barbarity of the 20^th century meant reinventing the ghost story.

The Vampire of Ropraz, by Jacques Chessex. Translated from the French by W. Donald Wilson. 106 pages, Bitter Lemon Press.

The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf. Translated by H. M. Waidson. Oneworld Classics.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Though separated by a century and a half, these two Swiss novellas detailing uncanny terror in rural communities suggest that the percentage of the demonic in Switzerland has grown considerably since Voltaire made his observation about the equality of good and evil.

The spanking new “The Vampire of Ropraz” asserts that, when faced with irrational violence, the forces of ignorance and fear predominate. The classic “The Black Spider” (which was first published in 1842; this is a reprint of the 1958 English edition) revolves around a reneged deal with the Devil, who wants, but doesn’t get, an unbaptized child as payment for his services. The betrayal unleashes the title monster, who can be stopped by goodness, if it is free of moral corruption and hypocrisy. The latter turns out to be a tall order. But at least there’s some Paradise around to counterbalance Gotthelf’s Hell.

Interestingly, both of these books root their avenging vision of mayhem in the brutal mistreatment of children. Gotthelf appears to wish for a God “Who would avenge Himself terribly for all the injustice that is done to poor children who cannot defend themselves.” In a strange way, the Devil is doing the Lord’s work by punishing the sadists among the low- and upper classes.

The suspected “vampire” in Chessex’s volume, which is based on a true story, was treated so horribly as a child he is barely human. Among the few who offer him kindness is a psychologist who sees the man as “more a victim of rural poverty than the tormentor of a society unwilling to allow him a chance in life.”

The differences between these two tales of sin, besides their metaphysics, turn on issues of scale and writing style. Chessex, who won the Prix Goncourt for his 1974 novel “The Ogre,” approaches this tale of enigmatic violence in a distinctly modern way. His prose style is clinical and tersely poetic. The plot is primal: in a turn-of-the century village high in the Swiss mountains the graves of three young women are violated: their bodies have been dug up and left heinously mutilated in the snow. (Be warned: the damage to the corpses is exactingly detailed.)

The population demands that the “vampire,” as the creature is called in the press, be caught and destroyed. Preachers decry the general immorality; garlic and crucifixes are worn by many for protection, all to ward off “the obsession with sexual, expiatory violation engrafted in the flesh. The ancient guilt of bodies punished, offered to the Devil.”

A stable boy named Charles Fevez is arrested and, despite scarce evidence, quickly convicted. After undergoing psychiatric observation he vanishes: years later Fevez turns up, according to Chessex, fighting in World War I. The author’s brusquely controlled fury blames religion, isolation, and sexual repression for the provincial village’s ungodly misery: “In this remote countryside a young girl is a lodestar for lunacy. For incest and brooding in unwed gloom on flesh for ever desired and for ever forbidden.” Anchored in frustration, it’s no wonder the forces of sanity are impotent.

The narrative’s serenely hands-off approach can be frustrating at times: readers are kept a safe distance from the goings-on in Fevez’s mind. But “The Vampire of Ropraz” proffers a lyrically compacted image of collective psychopathology, a bitterly ironic critique of frightened people who know that “the monster will have the last word in this vale of bitter tears and richly deserved darkness that God has granted us.”

Edward Gorey's cover drawing for a 1950s edition of "The Black Spider"

A Swiss pastor, Gotthelf serves up a far more complex yarn of God’s mysterious grace, a ferocious fairy tale that offers scenes of gore worthy of a Hollywood horror film. A tyrannical landowner demands the exhausted villagers (who just built him a castle) do a herculean job of tree planting. The Devil offers to do the task, if he gets an unbaptized child in payment. He is rebuffed at first, but then a woman (from another country; there’s a strain of xenophobia in the story) takes up the offer. Once the Devil has done his part he waits for the first unchristened child, only to have the kid baptized in record time.

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Thus a rein of terror of plague-like apocalyptic dimensions begins, with thousands of lethal black spiders spreading across the countryside, killing livestock, men, women, and children. The first batch of homicidal bugs pop out of the cheek of the woman who made the agreement:

Then Christine felt as if her face was bursting open, as if burning coals were being born, coming to life and crawling away over her face, over all her limbs as if her whole face was coming to life and crawling away red-hot over all her body. In the pale light from the lightning she now saw black little spiders, long-legged, poisonous and innumerable, running over her limbs and out into the night …

Amazing stuff, and the giant black spider that perches on people’s heads is yet to come! (The macabre images of creepy crawlies pouring out of a person’s cheek probably inspired similar scenes in “The Believers,” John Schlesinger’s 1997 film about voodoo.) Gotthelf tries to defuse the power of his imagination by nesting these nightmares in a reassuring framing tale. But the oh-so-idyllic description of the christening of a child suggests the sugar-glazed hysteria of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” Things are too desperately perfect; the fear of unspeakable evil redux transforms ceremony into fetish.

The translation by H. M. Waidson creaks and lumbers when it should explode—the book could probably use a fresher English version, though I haven’t read Mary Hottinger’s competing translation.

Thomas Mann may have gone overboard by admiring “The Black Spider” “like almost no other piece of world literature” – but it’s a sensational yarn of sin and salvation that still delivers a wonderfully cankered sting.