Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

 In December of 1916, more than six years after the death of Mark Twain, his final novel was published. Whether it was published in full remains a matter of mystery but what is known is that it had appeared throughout his later years in fragments and different versions. In its final (if not “finished”) form, The Mysterious Stranger is among Twain’s most exasperating works, painfully reminiscent of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno . It is, however, a revealing look into the mind of a grieving genius who had endured the loss of his wife and daughter and its release makes a valuable addition to Twain’s cannon.   Like the works it by Kipling and Carroll it is an episodic telling of encounters with a supernatural being visiting our world, in this case Satan, though not Satan himself…but Satan’s nephew who shares his name and arrives in 16th century Austria and tantalizes a group of young boys with shocking and often nihilistic teachings on t...