In a Glass Darkly is a collection of five short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1872, the year before his death. The second and third are revised versions of previously published stories, and the fourth and fifth are long enough to be called novellas.
The title is taken from 1 Corinthians 13, a deliberate misquotation of the passage which describes humanity as perceiving the world "through a glass darkly".
The stories, which belon...
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In a Glass Darkly is a collection of five short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, first published in 1872, the year before his death. The second and third are revised versions of previously published stories, and the fourth and fifth are long enough to be called novellas.
The title is taken from 1 Corinthians 13, a deliberate misquotation of the passage which describes humanity as perceiving the world "through a glass darkly".
The stories, which belong to the gothic horror and mystery genres, are presented as selections from the posthumous papers of the occult detective Dr Martin Hesselius.
An English clergyman named Jennings confides to Hesselius that he is being followed by a demon in the form of an ethereal monkey, invisible to everyone else, which is trying to invade his mind and destroy his life. Hesselius writes letters to a Dutch colleague about the victim's condition, which gets steadily worse with time as the creature steps up its methods, all of which are purely psychological....
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