Hauntings, by Édouard Dujardin (1861-1949), was originally published in French in 1886 and is here presented in its first-ever English translation by Brian Stableford. It appeared one year before the work on which the author's fame is largely based, Les Lauriers sont coupés, which was the first stream-of-consciousness novel ever written, and which was certainly hugely influential on later writers, such as James Joyce. Demonstrating the manner in which Dujardin developed that technique by stages, while using monologues and biographical commentaries as a means of analyzing and illustrating the psychological phenomenon of obsession, Hauntings is a minor masterpiece of symbolist fiction, specifically of the subgenre that consists of "manic monologues," few examples of which can compare with its curiosity, intensity and frank perversity.
