The Talkers

Casimir Sadoul is a brilliant, cynical writer whose wit masks a ruthless hunger for control, and his obsession with the red-haired Gilda Greenway drives this decadent, unsettling tale. From war-scarred Paris to New York's glittering salons and private laboratories, Robert W. Chambers traces a world of idle wealth, moral emptiness, and experiments that blur science, hypnosis, and the occult. At the Fireside Club, wealthy men gossip over Sadoul's strange hold on Gilda, while rumors of fear, manipulation, and even gland transplantation deepen the mystery. When Sadoul returns to New York and Gilda reappears at a masked party in George Derring's studio apartment, young Sutton is captivated by her beauty and fragility. Their brief intimacy collapses into horror when she suddenly dies in his arms, and Pockman's cold, clinical response reveals how little compassion survives in this world. Yet Gilda's death is not the end of the mystery. She confesses to Sutton that she is married to Sadoul and haunted by an "Other One" that has possessed her body, forcing him to witness a terrifying split between her true self and the intruder within. As Sutton searches for answers, he is drawn toward Sadoul's secretive laboratory work, where clairvoyance, levitation, soul photography, and other uncanny experiments suggest a dangerous union of desire, vanity, and forbidden science. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.