Recommendations
Books Like Lokis
Best books to read after Lokis by Mérimée
Mérimée's Lokis (1869) is the last and most elaborate of his fantastic tales — a story set in Lithuania where a young count who believes himself to be the son of a bear kills his bride on their wedding night, narrated by a skeptical Lutheran pastor who cannot explain what he has witnessed. The fullest development of Mérimée's fantastic ambiguity at the end of his career.
- 1Buy
La Vénus d'Ille
by Prosper Mérimée
The essential predecessor — the most perfect of Mérimée's fantastic tales, and the work in which the method of perfectly maintained ambiguity between the natural and the supernatural is established most economically before Lokis elaborates it at length.
- 2Buy
Le Horla
by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant's 1887 story of an invisible presence is the most celebrated of the century's later contributions to the French conte fantastique tradition — the same perfectly calibrated ambiguity between supernatural entity and psychological disorder that Lokis maintains, but moved from the exotic East to the bourgeois Normandy.
- 3Buy
Carmen
by Prosper Mérimée
The fullest application of the Mérimée cold ethnographic method to an exotic culture — the Lithuanian world of Lokis is to the French narrator what the Gypsy world of Carmen is to the French narrator, and the comparison shows how the same method works on different kinds of otherness.
- 4Buy
La Morte amoureuse
by Théophile Gautier
Gautier's 1836 fantastic tale of the vampire Clarimonde is the most important contemporary parallel — the same ambiguity between a supernatural love and a psychological fantasy, maintained with the same care as Lokis, in a clerical narrator who is also unable to explain what he has experienced.
- 5Buy
Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse
by Jan Potocki
Potocki's immense fantastic novel of the Eastern European and Spanish fantastic tradition is the most elaborate predecessor in the tradition of the exotic supernatural that Lokis participates in — the Baltic and Central European fantastic world that Mérimée enters in Lokis has its fullest earlier development in Potocki.
- 6Buy
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
James's novella is the most sophisticated English-language development of the fantastic ambiguity that Lokis maintains — the governess's account of the ghosts is as perfectly calibrated as the pastor's account of the Count, and neither admits of resolution.
- 7Buy
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's 1886 novella of the man who becomes an animal-like creature through a chemical transformation is the most important Victorian parallel to Lokis's Count — the same anxiety about the animality beneath the civilized surface, rendered through scientific rather than supernatural means.
- 8Buy
Mateo Falcone
by Prosper Mérimée
The earliest and most economical statement of the Mérimée method — the cold distance from a foreign honor culture that Mateo Falcone establishes for Corsica, Lokis applies to Lithuania, and the comparison shows the range and consistency of Mérimée's fundamental narrative approach across his career.
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