Panics by Barbara Molinard reads like a classic in the making. First published in French as Viens in 1969, this new translation by Emma Ramadan conveys the essence of Molinard’s preoccupations. Each story contains a singular vision and a confident, haunting voice, and unfolds with the dull terror of a nightmare.

The author’s biography is filled with captivating details: Molinard suffered from what her friend and mentor Marguerite Duras called the “intolerable nature of all life.” Molinard wrote hundreds of stories and tore up every one. It was only this slim collection that Duras and Molinard’s husband were able to wrest from Molinard. It’s surprising that these stories are not already part of the literary canon, taught alongside Kafka. The parallels with Kafka are unavoidable: like Kafka, Molinard lived in constant terror and experienced an overwhelming desire to destroy her work. Like his, her stories effortlessly blend a nightmarish surrealism with a tight, thematic focus on physical and mental illness, bodily autonomy, and control.

Each story begins with a protagonist doing something mundane: taking a stroll, walking to a meeting, attempting to catch a train. These ordinary situations soon become nightmarishly extraordinary. In “The Headless Man,” an unnamed woman observes people transforming into monstrous aberrations — a man becomes a snake with an ostrich head, an elegant woman becomes a gorilla. The changes continue until the protagonist notices a headless man with a face “of shadow and fog, of light and poetry: a face that stirred something deep within her and unsettled her very soul.” In “The Meeting,” a man named X is making his way to an out-of-town meeting through a bizarre and an increasingly inhospitable city; eventually he finds himself naked in a dark, walled enclosure from which he attempts to feel his way out. While these visions earn Molinard rightful comparisons to the surrealist writer Leonora Carrington, Molinard’s tone is uniformly darker than Carrington’s, less cheekily macabre.

Molinard’s surrealism focuses on violence: severed limbs and bodily suffering are common motifs, along with the commensurate mental anguish. In “The Severed Hand,” a pharmacist hacks off a customer’s hand, leaving him to wander the streets. At one point, the handless Hector must descend into a dark tunnel, a journey that leaves him mentally and physically exhausted. At another point, he watches five police officers strike his little brother with a nail-studded whip. When Hector finally understands that the laws of the world have changed — “virtue and generosity were now punishable as crimes of public indecency” — he plunges his fingers in a neighbor’s eyes to appease the police who are secretly watching him. In “I’m Alone and It’s Night,” a man is tortured by a “Master” and two people he believes to be nurses. They strap him to a bed, give him constant injections, place needles in his mouth, cut off his arms, and hurl abuse at him before finally pushing him out the door as “a free man.”

Not surprisingly, Molinard’s protagonists feel alienated and out of control. While they sometimes understand the task at hand — to reach a train, to get to a meeting — they become so caught up in a series of hostile events that they lose track of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. If they consider quitting or turning back, a disembodied voice often issues a command to “come” — the viens of the original French title — propelling each protagonist forward and suggesting a puppet master pulling the strings. In some stories, the characters really have no choice or autonomy. In others, it is the fear of committing a faux pas that compels them to keep going. Regardless of the reason, whenever the logic of the world shifts, everyone except the protagonist seems implicitly to understand the rules. The stories operate by dream logic: you must continue on your path even if you have forgotten your purpose or it no longer makes sense, and everyone/everything is operating according to rules to which you are not privy.

It is not simply the weirdness of each nightmare world that the protagonists find untenable. Another detail of Molinard’s stories, one that is immediately recognizable by anyone suffering from social anxiety, is her protagonists’ deep discomfort with ordinary social interactions. Hector of “The Severed Hand” wants to retrieve his hand but, fearing that he has offended the pharmacist, can only “stammer a few timid ‘thank yous’ and tiptoe out of the door, flustered.” In “The Headless Man,” the protagonist enters a hotel but becomes uncomfortable because she thinks everyone is giving her strange looks. She attempts to book a room, but the concierge’s harsh tone and confusing gestures make her panic and run away. In “The Cage,” the longest story in the collection, a woman attempting to enjoy her one day off from work finds everything disappointing and drab, from the shops to the people to the depressing caged animals at the zoo. She wants desperately to “make the most” of her one day off, but “she never [knows] how to go about it.” Anxiety propels Molinard’s protagonists into surreal plots while divorcing them from their own motivations. Like Camus’ Meursault, her characters are acting without understanding why, but unlike Mersault, they can articulate the anguish they feel as a result.

After finishing these stories, I found myself at once wanting more and aware that their scarcity heightened my enjoyment. If there were several collections, the repeated imagery might get a bit tedious: a disembodied voice saying “come,” tunnels, despair and panic, doors and keys. But, as with Kafka, this is it. There is no more. And for that, I feel gratitude tinged with despair.

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Barbara Molinard (1921–1986) wrote and wrote, but published only one book, the collection of short stories reviewed here.

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Emma Ramadan is an educator and literary translator from French.

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Melissa Reddish’s stories have appeared in Gargoyle, Raleigh Review, and Grist, among others. She is the author of My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud (Tailwinds Press, 2016), Girl & Flame (Conium Books, 2017) and The Lives We’ve Yet to Live (Tailwinds Press, 2022).