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An unknown name on a civil councillor’s visitor list turns a small puzzle into a consuming spiritualist obsession.
Snowbound at a roadside tavern on Christmas Eve, a young landowner hears how a ruined idealist’s convictions consumed his life.
One accidental sneeze sends a timid clerk into an escalating panic over rank, manners, and official displeasure.
One enormous eelpout under a riverbank root draws workers, a shepherd, and their master into the water.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A widower obsessed with his brilliant first wife brings a second bride into an abbey shaped by grief, opium, and dread.
A cruel young baron takes possession of a violent horse that may carry the spirit of his family's dead enemy.
A condemned man argues that people are sometimes driven to do what they know will destroy them.
A convalescent observer follows an unreadable old man through London, convinced that his need for crowds hides a life of crime.
A wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
On his wedding night, an ardent Norman sportsman must choose between his waiting bride and suspected poachers.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
After her only son is murdered, an elderly Corsican widow devises a patient and ruthless way to keep her vow of revenge.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
A learned provincial doctor finds a manuscript that seems to settle the mystery of the soul—and lets one doctrine consume his reason and household.
A solitary walker falls in love with a seaside house—and with the unknown woman whose photograph hangs inside.
A devoted hunter arrives late for the annual guillemot shoot carrying an obligation that tests the limits of his sporting priorities.
A man asks his doctor whether reason has led him to an invisible world—or into madness.
A jealous man insists he is sane while recounting the obsession that made him turn against his lover and her horse.
A dinner-table skeptic challenges tales of telepathy and prophecy, then offers two unsettling examples from his own experience.
