Léo Trézenik's The Confession of a Madman, originally published in 1890 and here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most substantial contributions to a subgenre of Romantic fiction that details delusional fantasies: accounts of strange experiences that could be interpreted as supernatural hauntings or as symptoms of mental derangement. Trézenik (1855-1902), who played a significant role in the Decadent Movement, was a former medical student, and might himself have wondered whether he might have been in danger of going mad, those associated with the Movement being routinely accused of insanity by hostile critics. In much the same spirit that they accepted and twisted the charge of "decadence," of course, some of them were not entirely displeased by the questioning of their sanity, and were eager to treat such suspicions as evidence of their genius-and the present novel certainly shows ample evidence of this latter property on the part of its author. The protagonist of The Confession of a Madman never mentions drug use, but the epilogue relating the "factual backcloth" to his delusions is careful to do so, in order to permit the interpretation that the fashionable opiate of the day-morphine-might have made a considerable contribution to the notional narrator's state of mind.

Confessions of a Madman personalizes the struggle of a civil war by following the fragmentation and irreversible separation of a single family. Written in alternating flashbacks and descriptions of a man s present, Sebbar delivers what French critics call a modern fable for adults: a tale of familial disorientation, identity, violence, and morality. A young man observes his mother go crazy waiting for her murdered husband to return home. Despite his estrangement with his father, the son vows to avenge his father s death by murdering his father s killers. In delving into his father s past, he discovers his role in an unsuccessful revolt and soon finds himself following in his father s footsteps. He finds himself questioning the value of religious standards and cultural traditions when confronted with sociopolitical conflict. This text discusses the meaningfulness of cultural traditions, their origins, and their potential contemporary repercussions when juxtaposed with a modern context of events."

It’s been twenty years since Western State Hospital was closed down and the last of its inmates reintegrated into society. Francis Petrel was barely out of his teens when his family committed him to the asylum, after his erratic behavior culminated in a terrifying outburst. Now middle-aged, he leads an aimless, solitary life housed in a cheap apartment, periodically tended to by his sisters, and perpetually medicated to quiet the chorus of voices in his head. But a reunion on the grounds of the shuttered institution stirs something deep in Francis’s troubled mind: dark memories he thought he had laid to rest, about the grisly events that led to Western State Hospital’s demise. It begins in 1979, when twenty-one-year-old Petrel descends into the state-run purgatory of an overcrowded, understaffed Massachusetts mental hospital. Surrounded by inmates roaming the halls like drugged zombies and raving behind locked doors, well-meaning orderlies, jaded nurses, and patronizing doctors, Francis finds friendship with a motley assortment of fellow patients: a would-be Napoleon, a wise ex-firefighter, and a man obsessed with battling imagined devils. But there’s nothing imaginary about the young nurse found sexually assaulted and brutally murdered late one night after lights-out. The police suspect an inmate, while patients whisper about visions of a white-shrouded “angel.” But the striking and mysterious prosecuting attorney who arrives to investigate has her own chilling theory—about the grim, telltale “signature” left on the victim’s body, a string of unsolved sex killings, and a very real devil who, by chance or design, has come to turn a madhouse into a slaughterhouse. Now, with the past creeping back to haunt his thoughts, and nothing but a pencil and the bare walls of his bleak apartment, Francis surrenders to the overwhelming need to tell the story of those nightmarish days. But because the crime was never solved, it’s a story doomed to remain unfinished. Until, like Francis’s long-buried recollections, the killer resurfaces . . . with a vengeance. A tour de force narrative journey through the eerily unpredictable mind of an utterly unusual hero, The Madman’s Tale will keep even the most astute thriller reader uncertain, unnerved, and unable to resist the tantalizing twists and turns of this fiendishly suspenseful shadow show.

Discusses the development of English fiction and the evolution of the English novel for a better apprehension of the included sample texts.