Three Drops of Blood (Oneworld Modern Classics)

This collection of previously neglected short stories displays the disturbing and evocative force in his writing, and shows Hedayat to be more than worthy of a place in the literary canon. They depict a world of revelation, uncanny similarity, grotesquery, and insanity. But Hedayat is never excessive in his writing. He conveys the most troubling of images with the simplest of symbols, and the complicated workings of the human mind in strictly ascetic language. "Three Drops of Blood" for example, tells the story of the protagonist's increasingly unstable mental state through the developing symbol of three drops of blood, and the question of where the blood emerged.Similarly, "Hadji Murat", depicts an almost Joycean epiphany in classically understated terms, as a man mistakes another woman to be his wife. These are stories which, though set in a distinctive milieu, depict universal truths, and cut to the very essence of humanity.