Bal Macabre: From their pens to your ears, genius in every story

As a young man he co-founded a bank in Prague, but a personal crisis and a suicide attempt turned his life away from commerce to a study of the occult and a career in literature.

His early short stories, supernatural, occult and weird, are full of promise, menace and the unusual.

In 1915 he published his landmark novel ‘Der Golem’ and followed these with others which, whilst noted, failed to achieve the extraordinary heights of the first. Meyrink was also a prolific and gifted translator of the works of Dickens and others into German.

After studying Theosophy, Kabbala and other religions he made, in 1927, a late conversion to Buddhism.

Gustav Meyrink died in Starnberg, Germany on the 4th December 1932. He was 64.