The themes that thread through these nine accomplished stories are drawn from the great tradition of the twentieth-century weird tale, and they are suffused with a distinctly cosmopolitan, European feel. Mark Samuels writes about the fundamental fears of modern life, especially the effects of isolation and the dislocation that city dwellers can experience in their inhospitable, man-made environment. The Search for Kruptos: The man who writes these lines bears only an infinitesimal resemblance to the bespectacled student of the waking world who left Dublin æons ago clad in his father's three-piece suit.