Sortilèges Et Autres Contes Crépusculaires

Hitherto unavailable in English, _Spells_ , by the Belgian dramatist Michel de

Ghelderode, ranks among the 20th century's most noteworthy collections of

fantastic tales. Like Ghelderode's plays, the stories are marked by a powerful

imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque, but in these the author speaks

to us still more directly. Written at a time of illness and isolation, and

conceived as a fresh start, _Spells_ was Ghelderode's last major creative

work, and he claimed it as his most personal and deeply felt one: a set of

written spells through which his fears, paranoia and nostalgia found concrete

form.

By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled

atmosphere of Brussels, Ostend, Bruges and London, _Spells_ conjures up an

uncanny realm of angels, demons, masks, effigies and apparitions, a twilit,

oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax mannequins and sinister relics.

Combining the full contents of both the 1941 and 1947 editions, this

translation of _Spells_ is the most comprehensive edition yet published.

**Michel de Ghelderode** was born in Brussels in 1898. After nearly a decade

of penning fiction, drama, literary journalism and puppet plays, in 1926 he

began to write almost entirely for the theater and the following ten years saw

the creation of most of his major plays. After 1936 he suffered from poor

health and his involvement with the theater diminished. In the later 1940s,

performances of his plays in Paris sparked a major awakening of interest in

his work. Ghelderode died in 1962; the interior of his apartment, packed with

books, pictures, puppets and masks, has been reassembled in Brussels as the

Musee-Bibliotheque Michel de Ghelderode.