"Alraune" (1911) can be quite a mixed bag of nuts, but I think this provocative, disturbing, and thoughtful scifi fantasy r…"Alraune" (1911) can be quite a mixed bag of nuts, but I think this provocative, disturbing, and thoughtful scifi fantasy romance may be worth your time.The opening chapters are sheer Radium-Age genius! We are treated to a single night in the crumbling white house of the Gontram family, and it is quite a delight of European eccentricities and dark humor, with cigar-chewing babies, a most unusual pair of princesses, and two of the laziest lawyers you'll ever meet. The whole night is written in such lovely rhetoric that it's blackened beauty borders on madness, all the more enhanced by the macabre two-tone illustrations of a pajama-clad guest curled up with his midget dog on a luscious canopy bed, and a deliciously creepy parlor scene bordered in rich tassels, heavy curtains, and fractals of paisley salon wallpaper, all in glorious purple and black. If you enjoy the work of Edward Gorey, you'll love the 1929 drawings by Mahlon Blaine. And if you appreciate eeriely sublime humor, the word craft here will send wonderful chills up your spine, from the depiction of a skeletal mother singing melancholy Woloochian lullabies while decked out like a faded Cruella to a father with ink-stained fingers full of lies that everyone somehow wants to hear bitching about there being no champagne left in the cellar. Death and mental illness hangs in the air heavy with cigar smoke, yet the family and their friends seem delightfully happy in their dysfunctional morbid lives, like the Addams family on laudanum.And this is only my thoughts on the first few pages! But does the rest of it hold water? Essentially, "Alraune" is inspired by the ultimate masterpiece of scifi horror, "Frankenstein," only in this case the monster is a woman of exceptional beauty. Her name, Alraune, harkens to German legend regarding the …