Robert Darvel, a young and penniless French engineer at the turn of the twentieth century, is an amateur astronomer obsessed with the planet Mars. Transported by a combination of science and psychic powers to Mars, Robert must navigate the dangers of the Red Planet while trying to return to his fiancee on Earth. Through his travels, we discover that Mars can not only support life but is also home to three different types of vampires. This riveting combination of science fiction and the adventure story provides a vivid depiction of an imagined Mars and its strange, unearthly creatures who might be closer to earthly humans than we would care to believe. Originally published in French as two separate volumes, translated as The Prisoner of the Planet Mars (1908) and The War of the Vampires (1909), this vintage work is available to English-language audiences unabridged for the first time and masterfully translated by David Beus and Brian Evenson.

"One day unlike the others, he'll run into a husband worse than the others, he'll run into trouble. I often thought this. Well, I was wrong, it was a woman he ran into, a woman worse than the others, here's what happened." What happened is the shocking tale told deftly by the brilliant French minimalist Christian Gailly in "Red Haze." It is a story at once spare and mysteriously complex, complicated by the ever odder perspective of the narrator as the details accumulate. Lucien, the narrator's friend, is a rake, a womanizer who womanizes once too often and loses his offending member to his latest conquest. As the narrator's interest in the mutilated man and the vengeful woman grows into an obsession, "Red Haze" becomes an unsettling story of how closely intertwined love and hatred, passion and cruelty can be. Winner of the prestigious Prix France Culture, "Red Haze" is the third of Christian Gailly's ten novels to be published in English. The first, "The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt," is also published by the University of Nebraska Press.