“The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end.”—Franz Kafka, “An Imperial Message,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir

Kafka is one of only two authors to whom Marcel Schneider, in his Histoire de la littérature fantastique en France, devotes an entire chapter. (The other is Edgar Allan Poe; both are foreign, perhaps tacitly corroborating the complaint, oft bandied about, that the Cartesian duality of the default French mindset does not readily admit of the fantastic.) Almost forty years after its definitive version, Schneider’s tome remains an authoritative overview of francophone contributions to the genre. A scholar and fantasist himself, he charts a clear if crooked lineage from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Poe to Kafka, each an evolution in the French notion of the fantastic that marked an immune reaction of native rationalism to a powerful and pervasive foreign intervention. Kafka he calls a bombe à retardement. Perhaps we may seek farther than the first translation at hand, “time bomb,” for one that places, like the French, less emphasis on countdown and more on excruciating, seditious deferment, a translation fortuitously specific to the period in question and since fallen from use: “delay-action bomb.” Though translations of the Czech insurance agent began dropping in the 1930s—Alexandre Vialatte in France, Anita Rho in Italy, the Muirs in England and America—Schneider dates the start of Kafka’s “ravages” to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. To hear Schneider tell it, one might think it took the Nazis to make bureaucracy more convincing. “Let us admire,” he writes, “the fact that so allegorical, symbolic, and secretive a body of work could have become the mirror of our own world: inconceivable before the 1940s, and seemingly self-evident ever since.” The first recorded use of “Kafkaesque” dates to this same postwar period. The scope of Kafka’s influence soon becomes apparent in works by Walter Jens, Dino Buzzati, and Maurice Blanchot, to the extent that in 1946, Action, the weekly of the French intelligentsia, asks: “Must Kafka be burned?” Too soon, Action, too soon . . . The next year, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud was born in a liberated Paris where, at a Victory Ball, his young mother had met his father, freshly returned from Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, emaciated and short a few teeth.

With A Life on Paper, the volume of selected stories from Small Beer Press that introduced him to American readers in 2010, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud was hailed by the Believer as a “master craftsman” and by Three Percent, Time Out, and the Times Literary Supplement as a successor to Poe, Nikolai Gogol, and Kafka. Fabulist John Crowley placed him in “the secret brotherhood that has only exemplars, no definition: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Nathanael West, Aimee Bender.” The ever-inventive Brian Evenson hailed him as a “focused writer pursuing a personal and highly individual oneiric project,” and in the New York Times, Jeff VanderMeer praised his “graceful, penetrating stories” that “linger on the edge of darkness and absurdity.” In proclaiming that “beautiful prose featuring ingenuous protagonists and clever, unexpected forays into horror are the hallmarks of these mischievous stories,” Publishers Weekly neatly summed up the general acclaim for the long-overdue debut of a figure central not only to reviving the short story in France but also to sustaining a tradition for which France is little known abroad: the fantastic.

The Messengers was Châteaureynaud’s first novel, published the year after his 1973 debut collection Le Fou dans la chaloupe (The madman in the dinghy). Awarded a short-lived prize from Nouvelles Littéraires, it secured the author publicity, a special issue of the eponymous magazine, and the then-princely sum of 50,000 francs, which enabled his purchase of a used Renault that, though its doors had to be bungeed together from within to keep from flapping open, nonetheless proved of great aid in his day job (one of several) as a rag-and-bone man. It has become, among Châteaureynaud’s works, something of a cult favorite kept continuously in print by small presses—La Table Ronde, Actes Sud’s Babel imprint—though the pared-down 1990 version differs significantly from the prizewinning original. As John Taylor notes in his first volume of Paths to Contemporary French Literature, “The more than 1,500 deletions and minor stylistic changes made by the author in this disquieting text have transformed a remarkable first novel into a masterly novella.” It is this novella that, more than three decades later, makes its way into English this month from Wakefield Press.

Its events are simple, symbolic. For as long as he can remember, the messenger has carried a message in the satchel on his back. He has never read it, nor does he know whom it is meant for; every seeming recipient proves to be not an end to his journey but a further relay in a chain referring him ever and exhaustingly onward. There is something of the automaton, not to say the demonic, about this driven man, into whose orbit comes a hapless, aimless, vagabond youth, most recently on the run for careless crimes. Nothing matters to the man but his mission; to fulfill it he will without hesitation forsake, murder, and betray. The youth simply has nothing better to do—with his time, his life—and starved for even a scrap of human affection, he falls in with this least fitting of mentors, his blunted understanding mercilessly conscripted by the messenger’s unyielding commitment to obscure purpose. This Beckettian setup plays out in a picaresque structure as the pair travel from rural manor to urban mansion, from endless vaulted cellars of suspended iron cages to a brothel of unsettling ritual on an island in the middle of a wooded lake—settings dimly reminiscent of traditional adventure, here warped and transfigured by a pervading atmosphere of ever-incipient yet rarely full-fledged nightmare.

It is no secret that The Messengers is Châteaureynaud’s most nakedly Kafkaesque work. Schneider notes as much, as does the Histoire de la littérature française de 1940 à nos jours by Jacques Brenner—writer, critic, and, incidentally, the editor at Grasset who acquired Le Fou dans la chaloupe. Châteaureynaud himself groups The Messengers unequivocally with “une littérature noire.” In an interview with Jean-Luc Moreau, the author asserts, “The core of my characters’ thinking and of my own is that the human condition is horror, pure and simple. What’s more, I tend to believe you stay an artist so long as you keep that in mind, bear subterranean witness to it.” The Messengers is more violent and less forgiving than his later work, told in a voice deliberately flatter than the voluble and ironic one that has come to dominate his short stories. A chill pervades this book, awash in grays. Its characters are constantly in uncomprehending motion—restless, even frenetic in their unfulfillment. The destruction they perpetrate is both callous and collateral. Fate, or fatedness, lies heavy as an edict over them, yet what fate, exactly? In lieu of reply, Châteaureynaud gives us bewilderment distilled to its essence of fearful alienation, yet also elevated to existential tenet. This book—in its mineral hermeticism, its curatorial descriptions, its abrupt monologues at once plaintive and plangent, its air of stifling opacity maintained by a flat refusal to psychologize—offers a rather pitiless vision of human endeavor: mystery, duty, momentum, undoing. Inevitably, the message outlives the man; the messenger is dead, long live the messenger.

Speaking of messages, there’s something of a love affair between French and English literature, especially where the fantastic is concerned. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in the American “weird tale,” a somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. But why should the last communiqués from French shores date more than a century back, or to the Surrealists at best? These traditions, twinned at birth and lost more in transit than translation, have as much to learn from their independent evolutions as from their history of mutual influence. Often grouped with Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Kubin, and Gustav Meyrink, Châteaureynaud also brings his own university studies in British literature to his work, having ingested Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Shelley, and H. G. Wells. His oeuvre inhabits the interstices of multiple traditions and movements, from the medieval marvelous to Jules Verne’s “vulgarisations” and Marcel Aymé’s Gallic whimsy, bringing to light intertwinings of literary histories forgotten or overlooked in the current French landscape. Châteaureynaud’s classically inflected fantastique descends directly from the conte, the European oral tradition of folk and fairy tale, through the Decadents and their contes cruels, cited as influences by such contemporary genre-bending movements of literary fantasy as the New Weird. His sense of the marvelous is fully inflected by the legacy of Surrealism—scholarship on which, as historian Gavin Parkinson observes, has focused almost exclusively on the 1920s and 1930s instead of the post–World War II period. However, Surrealism continued to inform the French fantastic even as the latter drew new life from continental fabulism (Calvino, Buzzati, Landolfi), which married folklore with experimental form; the South American magic realism of cosmopolitan expatriates (Octavio Paz, Borges, Julio Cortázar); and the manic inventions of a largely Anglophone import, the genre marketed as science fiction and fantasy.

In 1992, critic Jean-Luc Moreau published a “manifesto-cum-anthology” titled after the brief movement he was about to found: La Nouvelle Fiction. It was, wrote Taylor, “the most ambitious theoretical attempt since Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Pour un nouveau roman (1963) to define the affinities and literary aspirations of a group of French writers [and] an appellation . . . accepted, by the writers, with a unanimity never attained in the cases of, say, Surrealism or the New Novel.” All prestigious prizewinners publishing for over two decades, the seven authors assembled—among them Châteaureynaud—shared “a literary heritage of German romanticism, the English gothic novel, the oriental tale, spiritualism, speculative philosophy, and Surrealism . . . represent[ing] an aesthetic that differs considerably from those practiced by other prominent groups in French writing.” In its insistence on the expansive and gloriously counterfactual character of narrative, La Nouvelle Fiction offers points of intersection with our own riotous metafictioneers (Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme).

Unmistakably literary in his style and milieu (Renaudot, Goncourt, Académie Française prizes), Châteaureynaud unites the highbrow and popular, winning the 2008 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire at the international festival of speculative fiction, Utopiales, for his novel L’Autre rive—the first volume in a trilogy French critics called “Balzac directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Tim Burton.” Over the course of eleven novels, ten story collections, and countless chapbooks, he has broadened and deepened the literary possibilities of the fantastic, a key figure in charting the latter-day developments of its largely ignored French evolutions. So often an inveterate and unapologetic nostalgist, Châteaureynaud in The Messengers nevertheless braids a longing for the lost worlds of Alain-Fournier with Stevensonian adventure and something altogether more enigmatic and impenetrable. “The aim of literature that interests me,” claims Châteaureynaud, “is the abyss.”

Over the past decade, Wakefield Press, taking up the mantle from such stalwarts as Atlas Press and Exact Change, has steadily, surreptitiously curated a catalog of “overlooked gems and literary oddities,” the obscure and forgotten, yes, but also the eccentric, orphaned, and unbeloved—grotesqueries, railleries, and hauntings; ironies, idleries, and irrealities. With its list reaching from Surrealism to Oulipo to the Belgian supernatural to encompass their forebears and side forays, what better home for the Francophone fantastic? By reinventing literatures, we reinvent nations. By making new work available, we create new readerships, and teach readers, old and new alike, to read differently. This body of work deserves to be brought to light: a lost continent with global appeal. Just as fantasy itself can speculate in alternate histories, so Francophone fabulism presents an underside to standard twentieth-century literary and cultural histories, eschewing the usual critical landmarks. A milestone in the field, The Messengers is an overdue letter between two long-divided lovers once close, but fallen largely out of touch, a billet doux to rekindle the relationship between the French and English fantastic. And yet . . . how futile are our efforts. “If he succeeded in that, nothing would be gained. . .” Kafka’s caveat to his messenger’s conjectured progress echoes through the architectures concatenated in his parable’s concluding clauses: chambers, palaces, courts, gates, capitals, sediment. Who is to say our missives do not leave our hands only for the abyss? Still, we sit at our windows as evening falls, and dream. All translation is a bombe à retardement.