A Bad Dream: A Novel

Georges Bernanos's final novel, A Bad Dream, was released posthumously. It is a crime fiction in the style of his debut work Under the Sun of Satan and his compatriot François Mauriac's novel The Dark Angels. Bernanos establishes the cynical novelist Emmanuel Ganse and his anguished helper, Olivier, in the novel's first section, who cut figures of unsuspecting cooperation for the story's ultimate drama. Both Ganse and Olivier have crushes on Simone Alfieri, but only Olivier succeeds in pursuing her, oblivious to the fact that Simone's outward saintliness and "tremendous moral resistance" conceal the cruelty that will drive her to violence. As the story moves through its second part, Simone concocts her deadly design, even as she wills her spiritual self-immolation.

A Bad Dream grapples with the fundamentally supernatural nature of crime: its beginning in the Father of Lies, combining the forbidding ambiguity of a nightmare with the cutting specificity of reality.