Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah

Originally published in Danish in 1910, <I>Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah</I> is a fevered pulp novel that reads like nothing else of its time: an anomaly within the tradition of the Danish novel, and one that makes for a startlingly modern read to this day. Combining elements of the serial film, detective story and gothic horror novel, <I>Kzradock</I> is a surreal foray into psychoanalytic mysticism.<br><br>Opening in a Parisian insane asylum where Dr. Renard de Montpensier is conducting hypnotic séances with the titular Onion Man, the novel escalates quickly with the introduction of battling detectives, murders and a puma in a hallucinating movie theater before shifting to the chalk cliffs of Brighton. It is there that the narrator must confront a ghost child, a scalped detective, a skeleton, a deaf-mute dog and a manipulative tapeworm in order to properly confront his own sanity and learn the spiritual lesson of the human onion.<br><br>When Gershom Scholem read the novel in its 1912 German translation on the recommendation of Walter Benjamin, he concluded: “This is a <i>great</i> book, and it speaks a formidable language … This book lays out the metaphysics of doubt.”