This volume from the excellent Black Coat Press actually contains two short novels: Baal, or the Passionate Sorceress and The Devil's Lovers, both stylishly translated by Brian Stableford, who provides a fascinating introduction. Renee Dunan was a member of the French dada group, and also a prolific writer of the twenties and thirties, serving up erotica and pulp thrills with side orders of anarchism and feminism. (Or was she? Stableford examines, and finally dismisses, various theories as to his/her pseudonymous identity.)

Baal is a jazz age thriller, rather analogous to those found in the contemporary American "shudder pulps", full of kidnapped women, mad science, mild titillation and unbridled sadism, with a cracking villain in the sorceress Palmyre, who draws her power from tentacled extra-dimensional demons that parallel those being conjured by Lovecraft over in Providence at around the same time. It's lopsided and looney, but always entertaining.

The Devil's Lovers is rip-roaring Historical adventure about Satanists in 16th France. It seemed to me far better written, although perhaps simply better adapted to modern tastes. In keeping with much French writing of the period Satanism is represented as a revolutionary, subversive force on the side of the oppressed peasantry, rather than the neoliberalism-with-horns variant more often met with today.

Both of these novels are clearly the work of a writer who has done a fair amount of reading around the occult. Combined with her politics, and a firm grasp of the dynamics of pulp fiction, it makes for a fiery brew. Neither of the tales is great literature, but they are charming and eccentric curios that deserve to be better known amongst those of us who care for this sort of thing. Stableford is doing incredible work for Black Coat, along with their other translators, in bringing a wealth of French fantastique, SF and Horror into print in affordable in English translations. ( )