The Stratagem and Other Stories

About this book

Two travellers exchange stories at a desolate railway junction. Elsewhere, a woman experiences another person's death with unbearable intimacy, and an apparently private secret opens into a darkly comic confession. Aleister Crowley's fiction can be playful, cruel and unexpectedly unsettling.

This 1916 collection contains three stories: The Stratagem, The Testament of Magdalen Blair and His Secret Sin. The first relies on conversation and surprise; the second pushes psychic sensitivity into bodily horror; the third finds its unease in concealed desire. Together they reveal a side of Crowley's writing that is sharper and more varied than his reputation as an occultist might suggest.