Maurice Level

Tales of Mystery and Horror Maurice Level

Twenty-six stories translated from the French by Alys Eyre Macklin with introduction by H. B. Irving. Originally published in 1920 these are twenty-six tales stories of human passion from which the conventional glass has been stripped by the hand of a master; of terrible crimes, of fine sacrifices, of jealousy driving to madness, of haunting fears, of passionate love - there are no fundamental emotions that Level has not used which telling effect as the mainsprings of his stories. He has written them with an artistry which redeems them from sordidness and sensationalism, and which has made him famous in his own country as "a new master of the terrible". H. P. Lovecraft himself observed in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945) when speaking of Level's style: "This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself-the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors." Critic Philippe Gontier wrote: "We can only admire, now almost one hundred years later, the great artistry with which Maurice Level fabricated his plots, with what care he fashioned all the details of their unfolding and how with a master's hand he managed the building of suspense." Level's stories, with their gratuitous acts and mindless brutality, may be seen as precursors of "thriller" fiction and "slasher" films