Book #15 for 2024. This is from 1960, so obviously not part of the “My Novel Life” thing, might start that with the next book… but this is part of Valancourt’s current $2.99 deal, and that amount was too good to pass by. It kind of reminded me a bit of another Valancourt title, I Am Jonathan Scrivener, which is a great book I recommend thoroughly, although Lampo’s book does significantly different things with its titular man of mystery; in this case, our protagonist, the journalist Freek Groenevelt (yes, evidently “Freek” is a Dutch diminutive for “Frederik”, but I still kept mentally sniggering at it like the Anglophone teenager I am) first encounters Stiller when the latter writes him a letter about of his newspaper pieces. Nothing unusual about that, except the letter was apparently posted nearly forty years before said newspaper piece, and before Freek was even born. The situation is complicated when he has another encounter with Stiller in book form… except this book is about four hundred years old, not just forty. Someone appears to be playing a peculiar prank on Freek and some others… but who and why?
This is the sort of thing that could obviously be played for horror (and there is a sort of impending apocalypse undercurrent that I wish the book had done more with), except that Stiller appears to be harmless and perhaps even benevolent. I will confess to slight disappointment that the very end suggests some sort of Christ allegory all along or something, but despite that the mystery does remain compelling throughout even after Stiller finally makes his brief (and abruptly terminated) appearance; if it doesn’t have as much edge as it might, it still conjures a mood of disquiet and ominousness throughout. I liked this a lot.
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