Enoch Soames

In the glittering literary world of Oxford, Chelsea, and the Cafe Royal, the narrator first encounters Enoch Soames, a shabby, self-important minor writer who seems at once ludicrous and strangely compelling. Soames calls himself a "Catholic diabolist," reads Milton and Shelley with grave intensity, and publishes work such as Negations and Fungoids that baffles reviewers and readers alike. His poems are dismissed as obscure, uneven, and second-rate, yet the narrator cannot quite decide whether he is a fool, a failure, or a neglected genius. As Soames's hopes for recognition collapse, his bitterness hardens into tragic vanity. A chance meeting in a Soho restaurant brings him face to face with a sinister stranger who claims to be the devil and offers him a bargain: one hour in the British Museum reading-room a hundred years in the future, so he may discover his own literary fate. Soames accepts, vanishes into time, and returns shattered, haunted by an uncanny vision of posterity. Darkly comic, eerie, and deeply ironic, the story becomes a haunting meditation on artistic ambition, obscurity, fame, and the cruel distance between a writer's life and his afterlife. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.