The Road to Darkness

By Paul Leppin

The classic locked room detective novel which still baffles today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Release date: Dec 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781907650635

Reviews for The Road to Darkness

[steventx · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Paul Leppin was a German-speaking postal clerk from Prague. His writings were heavily influenced by those of Gustav Meyrink, an older writer associated with Prague, and they show a strong similarity with those of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the most famous novelist of the Decadent movement.The Road to Darkness is a collection containing three works: Daniel Jesus, a novella first published in 1905, Severin's Road to Darkness, a short novel first published 1914, and "The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto," a story first published 1914 or 1915. Each of these works is set in Prague and provides a sumptuously detailed look at the city during the waning hours of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.In Daniel Jesus the title character is a wealthy, embittered hunchback who delights in corrupting people with his money and his strange seductive power. He breaks up relationships, destroys marriages, and shatters people's religious faith. Those who don't succumb to him are driven to suicide. The climactic scene is a masked ball (masks being the only thing worn) where it becomes obvious that Daniel Jesus is none other than Satan himself.Severin's Road to Darkness is probably autobiographical to some extent. Severin is a young clerk who finds his thoughts driven--for reasons he can never understand--in an ever darker direction towards despair, murder and suicide. This despite the fact that he is so attractive that he can have almost any woman he wants. He dumps each girlfriend in succession for one more exotic and dangerous than the last, only to become sated, bored, and depressed. Severin haunts the smoke-filled Bohemian cafés where others live a dissolute and purposeless nocturnal existence. When he finally encounters a woman who doesn't bore him, he finds himself treated by her as he has treated others."The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto" is a brief depiction of the government's destruction of Prague's Jewish ghetto around 1900 as seen through the despairing eyes of a syphilitic prostitute. (Leppin himself would die of syphilis in 1945.)Daniel Jesus has the most entertaining plot of the three pieces, but all three of these works are most notable for their depiction of a unique place and time.