I didn't really know what to expect from this book, being translated from Hungarian into English. However I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. It is a brilliantly funny book, satirising genres of it's time - dramatic gothic romance with a touch of crime thriller thrown in. It's a beautifully written, tongue in cheek tale; a funny, gentle pastiche. It's Dracula meets Sherlock Holmes. Sheer genuis. Janos Batky, scholar and researcher, finds his way to Pendragon Castle in Wales, the guest of the eccentric Earl of Gwynedd. What follows are bumps in the night, ghostly horsemen on black horses, a wayward Irishman, Cynthia (the enchanting but dull Lady of the Castle), a grizzled prophet ("...a disturbing, fantastic, strangely threatening sight, complete with the obligatory wisps of straw in the hair that every self-respecting lunatic in Britain has sported since the days of King Lear"), strange experiments, eerie tombs, kidnappings and a mysterious trail that leads to London and back again. Written in 1934 by Antal Szerb in a country suffering anti-semitic persucution. This is his first novel, and while it is a beautiful, witty tale, it also manages to direct a spotlight onto the frailty of the human condition.