I suppose that I have always had a strong calling to Gothic fiction. When I first began spiraling down the rabbit hole of book-obsession, one of the first authors I read was Edgar Allan Poe. I read all 70+ stories collected in the book I owned (and perhaps I should make a post reviewing them someday) as well as most of his poems, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, his only complete novel. I was always mesmerized by Poe’s best, creepy stories, and I went so far as to memorize certain paragraphs of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or ramble about his most underrated stories like “Hop-Frog” or “Metzengerstein.” In time, my love for Gothic fiction grew, and I read many more famous works such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and, my favorite Gothic novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As of writing this blog post, I am currently reading Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, which turned out to be much more Gothic than I thought, so Hunchback might have competition for being the #1 best Gothic novel. However, there is only one author who has managed to absolutely stagger me (and when I say I am staggered by a work of fiction, that is as high a praise as I can give it) with a short story, rife with Gothic themes, uncanniness, psychological complexity, and a dreamlike and nigh Dionysian mode of writing where the story’s facts blend into uncertainty and in the chaos of understanding, powerful thematic and emotional forces take control. This story, my favorite short story, and probably also the best I have ever read, is E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” 

E.T.A. Hoffmann was a 18-19th century German short story writer and novelist, known for his weird fiction and magical subjects. I have only read two of his short stories, “The Sandman” and “Mademoiselle de Scudery,” which appear in the front of my Penguin Classics edition. I had read “The Sandman” many years ago on an online pdf, but I would highly recommend getting the Penguin Tales of Hoffmann instead if you can, since the translation reads much better and clearer. “Mademoiselle de Scudery” surprised me when I read it, and not in a good way. The whole short story reads like a 1000 page city mystery novel, in the same fashion as the other city mystery novels of the time, that has been compressed into 70 pages and with a rapidly produced, unedited narrative framing and writing style. The story is, for what it is, entertaining and the picture he makes of Paris as an untrustworthy, fearsome place is very interesting. However, the story itself is of a mediocre and rushed quality. 

In the Tales of Hoffmann book, to go from “Mademoiselle de Scudery” immediately to “The Sandman” can only be aptly described as going from a dingy, hole-in-the-wall motel, immediately to the fanciest 5-star resort, so that the latter experience blows the former out of the water in every regard. 

On the surface, “The Sandman” is about a young man named Nathaniel and his unfortunate life which is plagued by the memory and oftentimes appearance of a monstrous man named Coppelius, the story’s Sandman. The short story opens with three letters, the first one being by Nathaniel to a man named Lothario, the brother of Nathaniel’s girlfriend, Clara, the second being by Clara to Nathaniel, and the third being by Nathaniel to Lothario again. In the first letter, Nathaniel tells Lothario a story from his past. When he was a child, his father would tell him dark, whimsical tales that held his imagination, but every night at 9:00 exactly, all the children would have to go to bed because, as their mother said, the Sandman would get them. One day, young Nathaniel asked his mother who the Sandman is, to which she replied that there is not one, and she just says that to get them into bed. However, when Nathaniel asked an old woman who the Sandman is, to which she tells him he is a monster who sprinkles sand into children’s eyes so that their eyes burst out of their sockets so he can feed their eyes to his bird-beaked children on the moon. This story terrifies Nathaniel, and his mind becomes so haunted by the Sandman that he eventually sneaks behind some curtains to see his father meet the Sandman. 

However, what Nathaniel sees is not the Sandman of folktales but a disturbing, cruel man called Coppelius. Coppelius is someone whom his father seems to worship and who often comes over to the house, tormenting the children and eating their good food and drink. The language Hoffmann uses to describe Coppelius is always violent and uncanny, saying “fists” instead of “hands” and describing his body in grotesque detail. When Nathaniel sees Coppelius and his father getting into alchemical experiments soon after, he can not help but scream, whereupon Coppelius grabs him, throws him in front of a fireplace, and says that he will take his eyes. The father, horrified, begs the Sandman not to, at which point he grabs Nathaniel’s wrists and ankles and “unscrewed my [Nathaniel’s] feet, and fixed them on again now this way, now in that.” (Hoffmann, 92) The language, as one can tell, is vague and strange, and it is hard to understand what exactly Coppelius did to Nathaniel here. But afterwards Coppelius claims that he can not make his limbs look better, and that “The Old One” put them on perfectly. 

I do not want to dedicate too much of my article to explaining the plot, so if you want a plot explanation, please read the story! You definitely will not be disappointed. However, now that I have laid the backdrop for how the story begins I want to explain what makes this story so good and why it is my favorite one ever. Much like my favorite work of fiction/art ever, Euripides’ Bacchae, it is nearly impossible to pin down a definitive summary of what happened in the book. The reason is why is A) Hoffmann uses intentionally violent and emotionally charged language that is also very vague, and B) we do not know why many of the things that happen in the story happen for sure, and we also do not know how. However, like the usage of language, the uncertainty of the story is also intentional.

Nathaniel is described as a very emotional person. Throughout the story, when people do not match his Dark Romanticist viewpoints and energy, his go-to response is how close-minded and boring the people are. I am forced to think that Nathaniel in “The Sandman,” a dark, brooding plan plagued with ideas of fantasy and macabre that he frequently expresses with a pen and paper, has to be in some ways Hoffmann putting his own psyche onto the page. The fact that the 3rd person narrator of the story, who takes control after the letters are finished, opens the story explaining that this story was written foremost to be about Nathaniel’s unfortunate life is telling of what Hoffmann was most interested in, and where his story’s emphasis lies. However, his energy butts heads most often with his fiance Clara, who in turn finds his Gothic broodings to be utterly boring, and reminds him numerous times throughout the story that the dark powers controlling his mind are only as powerful as he believes them to be. In this way, there is a dichotomy to be found that affects the very veracity of the facts of the story: Nathaniel believes in the Sandman and he believes in all the magical monstrosities which only affect him in the story; Clara is wholly atheistic towards such fantasies and very well believes that any magical encounters he has in the story are but exaggerated nothings in his mind. “The Sandman” therefore has two competing storylines of what is really going on, and because so much could be dismissed as fantasy, and so much must be real, demonic horror, it becomes uncertain and mentally chaotic to try to decipher everything. 

But this is Hoffmann’s intention. The reviews I have read of “The Sandman” usually use the word “uncanny” to describe the story, or other, emotionally charged, vague words. That is because “The Sandman” was meant to be a nightmare; the pen-and-paper display of a psychotic mind overwhelmed with brooding and phantasmagoria, unable to tell reality from fiction, and driven by demonic powers. If “Mademoiselle de Scudery” was meant to hook readers like The Da Vinci Code does, “The Sandman” hooks readers like The Sound and the Fury; a confusing, turbulent ride, packed with raw emotions, that is humanly impossible to tear your eyes from. 

I suppose in sum, “The Sandman” is my favorite short story ever because of how well-written it is, how mesmerizingly uncanny and mind-bending, and for how much it scratches the Gothic-fiction itch I have. If you are yet to read it, I highly recommend picking it up in physical form, and I promise, if you like uncanny, eerie tales, you will adore “The Sandman.”