Visions & Apparitions: Selected Tales of the Uncanny

Visions & Apparitions brings together in English for the first time the greater part of Ladislav Klíma’s ghost stories. Klíma employed the horror genre as a way to explore his subjectivist philosophy, and by all accounts he enjoyed writing them to pass the time. At times playful and lyrical, if not outright comical, the stories were written at various stages, with the final text, ostensibly about a vampire, dictated from his hospital bed just months before his death. As a whole, they reflect Klíma’s lifelong preoccupation with the nature of “reality” as a product of one's mind and a matrix of madness, hallucination, and dream permeated with all-to-real phantoms and ghouls, which, akin to Poe, have sprung from the unconscious or emerged through the power of imagination and desire, materializing as more than mere figment.

Most of Klíma's short fiction was published posthumously, and often with considerable editorial intervention, even including whole passages (if not entire texts) of dubious provenance. The present translations have largely relied on the manuscript versions, without the occasional ersatz beginnings and endings tacked on to make a story seem less fragmentary.