Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness, and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France

``Dream is a second life,'' begins Nerval's classic, ``Aurelia,'' and that is the theme illuminated by this memorable anthology of supernatural tales of 19th-century French fiction. Kessler has gracefully translated nine of the 13 stories and written an introduction that puts the stories in an historical context of the French Revolution, the Terror and contemporary scientific and spiritualist schools of thought. Stories by Balzac, Dumas, Maupassant and Verne delve into that gray slip of a space between dreams and wakefulness where somnambulism is not the exception but rather the rule. The anthology opens with the first English appearance of Nodier's stunning ``Smarra,'' in which vampires and nightmarish images violate the landscape. In Balzac's ``The Red Inn,'' a crime is committed by one man in thought and by another in deed. In Merimee's compelling ``The Venus of Ille,'' a demonically beautiful statue comes to life to exact revenge on a man who pays her disrespect. Severed heads do not mean severed tongues in Dumas's ``The Slap of Charlotte Corday,'' (also in its first English translation), an effective exploration of irrational terror evoked by the subconscious. These haunting tales are definitely not bedtime stories for the faint of heart. But for stronger sorts, this superb anthology is a literary tour of the phantasmagoric landscape of dreams. (Apr.)