The Blind Owl

A liminal, hallucinatory, dreamlike story that borders on death/life and other/self. Darker than “The Dreams in the Witch House” and more poetic than “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Blind Owl” is rumored to lead its readers to madness or suicide (I thankfully succumbed to neither). It is a book fueled by opium and wine... melancholy and shame, with a narrator occupied by a sexual stupor concocted from memory and imagination set across a bleak Iranian backdrop.

The prose is gorgeous and evocative of imminent insanity, but is also remarkably comprehensible and clear. Hedayat (and translator Costello) slips through the narrator's perceptions effortlessly, managing to avoid the opaqueness of Surrealism. The narrator seems mostly unsure of who he is, where he is, or when it is, but as a reader I wasn't confused by random, out-of-place imagery. At the end of the book it all made sense, but I wanted to read it again to peel back another layer of reality.

“The Blind Owl” is beautiful horror full of delirium and despair in a shadowland of morbid lust. I won't spoil it by reviewing the symbolism, plot, or any interpretation. The reading of this story is its own experience – out-of-time yet hauntingly present.