Back in the early 1930s Gilbert Seldes—a literary critic and early champion of popular culture—was asked to contribute an introduction to a volume of stories by Fitz-James O’Brien, now often regarded as the most original American writer of supernatural fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. At first Seldes declined, confessing that he’d never read anything by the man. But when the publisher jogged his memory, Seldes remembered that in some anthology or another he had in fact come across “The Diamond Lens,” O’Brien’s 1858 account of an obsessive microscopist who discovers an Eden-like world in a drop of water—and falls in love with the beautiful woman who lives in it.

Seldes finally did introduce The Diamond Lens and Other Stories,* *published in 1932 as a limited edition with subtly sinister illustrations by Ferdinand Huszti Horvath. The book featured seven of O’Brien’s tales of the weird and grotesque, most notably “The Wondersmith,” which centers on a satanic toymaker whose miniature figures can be animated to kill the young children who play with them. According to Anthony Boucher, who reprinted the story in the December 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “almost the whole body of writing on robots is here in matrix.” That matrix, however, is one of melodramatic grisliness and horror in the style of the French Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. In one blood-drenched chapter, the inventor of these devil dolls tests their ferocity by setting them loose to massacre the caged birds in a pet store.

O’Brien’s even better-known “What Was It?: A Mystery” describes a life-or-death struggle against an invisible and murderous humanoid entity. So popular was the story that the O’Brien scholar Jessica Amanda Salmonson found it represented in “over thirty anthologies between 1896 and 1964.”

Nevertheless, the Celtic Poe, as the Irish-born O’Brien has been called, is probably as little known today as he was in Seldes’s time. Yet he deserves serious attention, if only for establishing or promulgating some of science fiction’s most familiar tropes: microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, robots. In one of his stories a fabricator of artificial eyes creates a portable surveillance camera in the form of an egg-size eyeball that transmits images to its creator. In another, O’Brien sets down the precise engineering specs for the construction of a gyroscope-like personal flying machine.

While even his best stories tend to be structurally ramshackle and go on just a little too long, they always display O’Brien’s remarkably protean imagination. For example, “The Dragon-Fang Possessed by the Conjurer Piou-Lu” is a comic fantasy set in an ancient China that never was, one in which a tailor can be referred to as an “inventive closer of symmetrical seams.” Utterly surreal, the novella-length “From Hand to Mouth” takes place in the Hotel de Coup d’Oeil and features disembodied hands and ears, a talking bird, a heroine whose legs have been stolen, a mirror that acts as a clone generator, and an ancient guardian who, like Dante’s Bertran de Born, carries his head under his arm. The hotel’s owner is Count Goloptious, a kind of psychic vampire who slowly drains the residents of their creative vitality. For the most part this gothic comedy resembles a mix of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In fact, a considerable number of O’Brien’s stories should be viewed as absurdist fantasies. In “The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Papplewick” the middle-aged protagonist finds himself accidentally transformed into a human magnet, just misses becoming a star exhibit in P.T. Barnum’s museum of grotesques, and ends up on an expedition to the North Pole, where he encounters a talking walrus. An amusing playlet, “The Gory Gnome,” neatly sends up the vogue for sentimental, romantic melodrama. Set in the Harz Mountains, it features a star-crossed couple described as the “despairing Lover” and the “Distressed Heroine.” In the opening scene of this five-page theatrical extravaganza—an active volcano plays an important role—Anna Matilda, the Distressed Heroine, enters “hurriedly, with disheveled hair, eating a sandwich,” which she quickly finishes before announcing to the audience that she’s been living on nothing but wild berries. Another story, “The Comet and I,” depicts an anthropomorphized comet taken on a tour of New York, not excluding the saloons. It’s the kind of jeu d’esprit long associated with Donald Barthelme.

The full panoply of Fitz-James O’Brien’s macabre fiction—horror stories, satires, weird tales, contes cruels—has now been assembled by the independent scholar John P. Irish in an exceptionally handsome three-volume edition comprising An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848–1854),* The Diamond Lens and Others (1855–1858)*, and What Was It? and Others (1858–1864). Irish’s introductory essay, which is spread out over the three volumes, provides a useful overview of O’Brien’s life and extended commentary on his major works, but also makes claims for the writer’s importance and influence that seem overzealous. No matter. Though endnotes explaining period slang and obscure allusions would have been helpful, this is the most complete edition of O’Brien’s supernatural writing now available, superseding that compiled by Salmonson in 1988.

Both Irish and Salmonson use the original magazine appearances of the stories for their copy text instead of relying on the sometimes slightly edited versions printed in William Winter’s pioneering 1881 volume, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien. However, we now know that Salmonson inadvertently made two misattributions: “Seeing the World” is actually an English version of a work by Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky, and “A Dead Secret” was written by George Augustus Sala. This confusion arose because much of O’Brien’s copious writing for periodicals appeared anonymously, as was then the common practice.

Moreover, O’Brien was one of those prolific professional writers who could turn their hand to anything. Sensitive to the era’s penchant for tear-jerking sentimentality, he could produce “Duke Humphrey’s Dinner,” an O. Henry–like tale about a starving young couple who pretend to dine on imaginary delicacies and are rescued from death at almost the last moment. Alas, the two orphaned waifs and the organ grinder’s monkey in another of his tear-jerkers aren’t so lucky: all three freeze to death—on Christmas Eve.

As a magazine poet, O’Brien could turn out Keatsian lyrics, tragic ballads, or political satire. (A handful of the poems with an eerie or fantastic cast are included in Irish’s edition.) As a journalist, he produced reams of opinion essays—it’s been estimated that half of his three hundred or so known pieces of writing are devoted to political or economic matters—but he could also dash off lighthearted casuals, some under the rubric the Man About Town. His book and theater reviews blend insight with humor, always a winning combination. Though one of Herman Melville’s earliest admirers, he nonetheless suggested that the author of* Typee and Mardi would be wise to adopt the familiar but elegant prose style of Joseph Addison rather than the baroque grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne. (Happily, Melville didn’t take this advice.) In judging a revival of his own popular comedy A Gentleman from Ireland, *O’Brien spared neither the production nor his youthful self:

The dialogue is sometimes smart, but never witty, while occasionally it rises into the realm of fustian. The ending of the first act is weak and nonsensical. There is no characterization in it from beginning to end, and everybody talks like everybody else.

That’s scathingly (if half facetiously) dismissive, yet this transplanted Irishman’s savage indignation could sometimes match that of his countryman Jonathan Swift, particularly in the best of the early stories, “The King of Nodland and His Dwarf.” In Nodland, to sleep as many hours as possible is the whole aim and purpose of life. Given the resulting universal torpor, the Nodlanders maintain their somnolent lifestyle by enslaving members of the pastoral Cock-Crow people from a neighboring country. Meanwhile, Nodland’s government constantly replenishes its treasury—the money largely spent on frivolous luxuries for the king—by levying increasingly arcane taxes. Lord Incubus, the prime minister, reasons that “the more necessary a thing is…the more it ought to be taxed. Superfluities can be dispensed with, but if you want to be sure of a man’s money, tax something that he cannot possibly do without.”

This policy soon leads to a graduated impost on the number of hours a citizen spends asleep. Only the first four are tax-free. Unsurprisingly, a firebrand named Ivned soon calls for revolution, though he actually just craves total power for himself. “He possessed a certain species of vulgar, brazen eloquence, that was very effective with a particular class,” O’Brien writes.

His effrontery was dauntless, and his conscience, from systematic stretching, had become so large that it was capable of embracing any set of opinions from which the most profit was to be derived. He blustered largely about an article he called “patriotism,” but which in reality meant self-interest; he was, in short, one of those bold, bad men who was sufficiently elevated above his own low class to be regarded by them as a leader, but who was too far beneath any other to be looked on in the light of any thing but an unpleasant pest.

Anything but an unpleasant pest himself, the easygoing O’Brien appears to have charmed every echelon of New York society. He was, however, cagey about his past. We now know—largely from the excellent 1944 biography by Francis Wolle—that he was born in Cork, either in 1826 or 1828, to a well-off Irish family. He later dissipated his inheritance during a two-year London spree, almost certainly resided in France for a time (he spoke excellent French), and* *immigrated to the United States in late 1851, possibly to escape the consequences of an affair with a married woman.

In New York, where he lived throughout the 1850s, O’Brien quickly joined the loose sodality of flaneurs and freelance writers who called themselves Bohemians. By his own definition, true Bohemians rejected bourgeois society to “cultivate literature and debts, and, heedless of the necessities, fondly pursue the luxuries.” In his later years, Thomas Bailey Aldrich—by then one of the country’s most popular poets—would recall “how hurt I was on an occasion when O’Brien borrowed $35.00 off me, to pay a pressing bill, and, instead of paying the bill, gave a little dinner at Delmonico’s to which he did not invite me!” This was typical.

O’Brien consistently dressed as a well-to-do gentleman, was often broke, seldom had any long-fixed abode, frequently drank evenings away at Pfaff’s beer cellar (which Walt Whitman also frequented), regularly got into fistfights (in one he had his nose badly broken), enjoyed practical jokes, and could never maintain the self-discipline needed to hold down a steady job. Better to live by one’s wits as a hack, despite the pittance paid to contributors by even the best magazines, Harper’s Monthly and The Atlantic. As a result, O’Brien needed to write quickly and steadily. In a novel by William North, a character transparently modeled after him is called Fitzgammon O’Bouncer: “A professional critic, he wrote brilliantly but falsely. His imagination dominated his judgment, and worst crime of all, he was superficial—worse yet, consciously superficial.”

That’s an exquisite put-down, but it’s rivaled by O’Brien’s own self-mocking humor. In a piece titled “Walk Up, Ladies!” he offers himself as the grand prize in a lottery sponsored by an (imaginary) association of eligible bachelors. He naturally catalogs the rare qualities he brings to this signal honor:

I am…of medium height, while in my figure, symmetry and strength are harmoniously mingled. My nose and forehead form the Phidian line. My hands and feet are small and aristocratically shaped, and my eyes by turns melt with the soft emotions of the heart, or flash with the nobler passions of the hero. My hair is chestnut, and flows in long ringlets over my neck, somewhat like the hair of the Apollo Belvidere…. Words fail me in endeavoring to describe my whiskers and mustache. I have been informed by the most excellent female judges that even in their dreams they never imagined any thing more lovely. My accomplishments are varied.

After the Civil War broke out in 1861, O’Brien could add “courage” to the list of his virtues. Proudly American and a staunch Unionist, he immediately enlisted and all too soon was shot during a kind of impromptu duel with a Confederate officer. After much suffering, Fitz-James O’Brien died in 1862 at the age of thirty-five.

While O’Brien’s prose usually reflects the easy efficiency of the born journalist, one still pauses over his flair for striking phrases and bizarrely surreal imagery. A shark is likened to “the thin blade of a sharp knife, cutting through the water with a slow, even, deadly motion.” Perfect. But to describe a winter storm, he writes, “The large flakes fell sleepily through the dim blue air, like soft white birds that had been stricken with cold in the upper skies, and were sinking benumbed to earth.” (Hmm, cloudy with a chance of chickens?) I particularly love the title he originally proposed for a collection of his stories, “Flotsam and Jetsam—Things Lost by Shipwreck, or Thrown Overboard to Save the Vessel.”

As it happens, there was no collection of O’Brien’s work until 1881—nearly twenty years after his death—when his friend William Winter brought out *The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien. *Following a section of reminiscences from now forgotten literati of the time, it reprinted over a hundred pages of O’Brien’s poetry and thirteen stories. In general, Winter emphasized the darker, more disturbing fiction.

In Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence counseled readers to “look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning.” In O’Brien’s case, the diabolism is often right on the surface. In one harrowing conte cruel, a loving wife and mother gradually becomes strangely moody, then one night tries to murder her husband as he sleeps. Why? he asks. “‘I was weary of you,’ she answered, in a cold even voice—a voice so level that it seemed to be spoken on ruled lines, ‘that is my reason.’”

In “The Lost Room” a man residing in a labyrinthine apartment building discovers that his room may exist in two (or more) dimensions. When he opens its door one evening he surprises guests dressed in eighteenth-century finery trading quips at an elegant dinner party. When he insists that these interlopers leave his room, one of them smugly asks the epistemological question, “How know you that it is your room?” The narrator has already heard rumors that some of the building’s inhabitants are cannibals or demons. Could these be they? Or might they be insidious enchanters? All his own belongings have vanished, but in their stead he glimpses expensive, more sophisticated versions of the originals:

Wherever my eyes turned they missed familiar objects, yet encountered strange representatives. Still in all the substitutes there seemed to me a reminiscence of what they replaced…. There lingered around them the atmosphere of what they once had been.

At the end of the story, the room disappears entirely, leaving only a blank wall.

Again and again, O’Brien likes to embed his reader inside a protagonist’s disordered mind, as in “The Hasheesh Eater,” or reveal the existential vertigo that results when the universe no longer makes sense, as in “Mother of Pearl.” In “Uncle and Nephew” the eponymous characters flip-flop between which of them is sane, which insane. Even O’Brien’s most gothicky tales eschew the then-typical gothic setting: instead of gloomy castles or the decaying House of Usher, he sets the action in cheap rooming houses in contemporary New York. You could actually visit the sites of the events he chronicles. We are told that the building in “What Was It?” is located on 26th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues; a note informs readers that they can soon see a plaster cast of the invisible monster’s head at a local museum.

Such localization, leisurely set forth, lulls the reader with its comforting familiarity—and only then does O’Brien introduce the ominous thing, the unsettling anomaly. To use Freud’s terminology, the heimlich (homey) suddenly grows unheimlich (uncanny). In some instances, the horrific or bizarre events turn out to have been only nightmares, drug-induced visions, or monomaniacal frenzies. This sort of bathetic letdown mars—some would say ruins—several otherwise terrifying shockers. As a writer, O’Brien regularly has trouble with plotting and especially with closure, which explains why so many of his works end abruptly or exist only as fragments.

One reason “The Diamond Lens” remains particularly admired lies in its being susceptible to varying interpretations. Consider no more than its first half. In the story’s opening pages the narrator, Linley, recounts his childhood obsession with microscopy, which began with the gift of a simple microscope from a distant cousin. As he recalls,

I comprehended then for the first time the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments.

To satisfy the wishes of his family, he agrees to enroll in medical school, but never sets foot in a classroom or laboratory. Instead he expends all his resources in acquiring every possible instrument or accessory needed for advanced microscopic research.

Already in this set-up, O’Brien hints at two ways to understand what follows: we can believe the narrator utterly, or we can conclude that monomania has left him “enchanted,” that is, delusional. Most readers take the story as “real,” despite the implication of a statement such as this:

It was I who resolved the singular problem of rotation in the cells and hairs of plants into ciliary attraction, in spite of the assertions of Mr. Wenham and others, that my explanation was the result of an optical illusion.

Of his later research Linley admits that

like all active microscopists, I gave my imagination full play. Indeed, it is a common complaint against many such, that they supply the defects of their instruments with the creations of their brains.

At this point, O’Brien presents Jules Simon, an urbane fellow tenant of Linley’s building who regularly persuades him to buy unneeded and overpriced knickknacks. The source of these supposed treasures is kept deliberately vague. As Linley says, “I came at length to the conclusion that this peddling was but a mask to cover some greater object.” What might that object be? One evening Simon mentions, with unusual enthusiasm, the séances of the spiritualist Madame Vulpes. She can reveal “the most astonishing things in the world.”

Almost immediately, Linley wonders whether she can help reveal astonishing things in the microscopic world. At their meeting, Madame Vulpes summons the spirit of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who tells his fellow microscopist that fame will be his if he creates a super-lens out of a 140-carat diamond. Totally disheartened, Linley realizes that such huge diamonds exist only in “the regalia of Eastern or European monarchs.”

After returning home, Linley visits Simon, who is closely examining something that he quickly hides away. The normally self-possessed sophisticate behaves oddly, appearing nervous and jittery for no apparent reason. To “probe the mystery to the bottom,” Linley gets Simon drunk, then tricks him by saying he already knows his secret, so why hide it any longer? Reluctantly, or so it would seem, Simon shows him a large and lustrous diamond: “I could just gather from his drunken statements (of which, I fancy, half the incoherence was affected) that he had been superintending a gang of slaves engaged in diamond-washing in Brazil” and one day absconded with the stone and fled to New York. If this is true, why is Simon’s incoherence “affected”? Needless to say, the diamond, which he calls “The Eye of Morning,” weighs exactly 140 carats. “Here was an amazing coincidence. The hand of Destiny seemed in it.”

I’ll stop there, except to add that Linley does create his diamond lens from the Eye of Morning, and it reveals a fresh, paradisical world in a droplet of water, one inhabited by a lovely human female. Unknowingly, Animula, as he calls her, becomes the adored object of his almost mystical ecstasies: “My whole life was absorbed in contemplation as rapt as that of any of the Romish saints.” Growing ever more hopelessly in thrall to his microscopic beloved, Linley berates himself that what he feels “is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess.” As a test, he visits a theater to see a celebrated dancer, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. He finds her almost repulsive compared with the sylphlike perfection of his Animula. While there’s much more to the story, you can probably guess what will eventually happen.

At the story’s very end, Linley—like some character out of Poe—confesses that “They say now that I am mad; but they are mistaken.” Are they? O’Brien leaves this an open question. Perhaps Linley did see into another world, but enough clues have been planted to suggest that he might have been imagining everything. I suspect that O’Brien intended this ambiguity. As with Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” we ask ourselves: What is real? Everything or nothing? How much is the product of an unstable imagination?

“The Diamond Lens” might even incorporate an additional turn of the screw: Could Linley have been the dupe in a scam cooked up by Madame Vulpes and Jules Simon? It does seem that he has been subtly manipulated, first to consult the spiritualist, then to learn—so fortuitously—of a diamond weighing precisely 140 carats in the unlikely possession of his fellow tenant. Simon and Vulpes probably counted on Linley to pay whatever it took to acquire the gem, which was doubtless a fake of some sort. Alas, the con artists misjudged the ends to which the fanatical microscopist would go to further his research.

H.L. Mencken once noted that Fitz-James O’Brien was the only significant artist to die in the Civil War. His best works really are significant, too, despite their shaky plotting and occasional smudges of mid-nineteenth-century melodrama. This “fabulous fantast,” as Sam Moskowitz called him in *Explorers of the Infinite *(1963), remains a crucial figure in American literature’s dominant fictional mode, which isn’t the novel but rather the romance. O’Brien’s stories can’t match the concentrated visionary power of Poe, the Calvinist moral intensity of Hawthorne, or the grim ironies of Bierce, but the best of them do come close. Yes, he is just a minor writer. But aren’t minor writers sometimes the ones we love the most?