Imbued with a sense of light-hearted cynicism, literary crictic Jules Janin (1804-1874) penned a vast number of eccentric and sometimes improvised fantastic and horror stories, now mostly forgotten. This first-ever American collection gathers a sampler of his unusual talent, as exemplified by the eponymous tale about a dead man kept alive by magnetism, published several months before Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845). Other tales gathered here include fake folk legends, paradoxical ghost stories in the vein of ETA Hoffmann, and surreal reflections on the supernatural nature of music. "Janin was probably closer to Poe in spirit, although his ambition took him in a different direction." Brian Stableford.